We spend enormous energy debating polarization, misinformation, and distrust in government, while ignoring the one democratic institution millions of Americans encounter most directly: the public meeting itself.
I was recently asked what the single most important thing mayors could do to improve civic health is. My answer is simple: scrap the traditional public meeting agenda and rebuild it around participation. Public meetings should encourage dialogue, learning, and deliberation, not just timed testimony before decisions are made. We could even add to that some type of celebration, fun, and/or relationship-building activity.
There are roughly 90,000 local governments in America that conduct public business in nearly identical ways: elected officials sit on a dais, follow an agenda governed by Robert’s Rules of Order and hear residents speak for two or three minutes at a microphone. We have come to accept this format as a healthy expression of local democracy.
Across the country, public meetings are increasingly marked by hostility, resentment, and mutual distrust, yet very little is done to make people feel more welcome and encouraged to participate.
Imagine attending a city council meeting for the first time. You don’t know you have to sign up in advance to speak. You enter a formal chamber facing a raised dais and a microphone. The meeting is recorded. Eventually, you gather the courage to speak, only to be cut off mid-thought because your three minutes expired. Council members barely look up. No one thanks you for showing up instead of staying home after work. The entire experience communicates that public participation is something to endure rather than welcome.
Modern meetings are optimized for efficiency, and the agenda is the mechanism that enforces those priorities. Officials need to move through agendas, minimize disruption, and complete procedural business. But efficiency has come at the expense of legitimacy.
Robert’s Rules of Order were designed to maintain procedural order, not cultivate civic trust. Yet many municipalities now structure public participation primarily around procedural control: strict time limits, limited interaction, and rigid speaking rules enforced by the chair.
When frustration inevitably erupts over our inability to engage with local governance, municipalities often respond with even more procedural control: stricter enforcement, shorter speaking windows, and greater reliance on the chair’s authority. Either mayors, elected officials, city clerks, city attorneys, and city managers are fully aware of their own role in this dilemma (and they should be experiencing it firsthand regularly) and haven’t internalized that the problem starts from how they set the agenda, or they either think they can’t do anything about it, or feel they don’t need to.
In conversations with city clerks and council chairs, I’ve often heard the same explanation for why meetings function this way: because that’s how they’ve always been done. Yet state sunshine laws often provide far more flexibility than municipalities use. Public meetings are not nearly as structurally fixed as many officials assume.
Some councils and elected officials now require security at public meetings and as escorts afterward. That hostility is real. But decades of designing public participation around frustration may help explain why resentment now fills so many meeting rooms.
I’m more inclined to blame the design of our public meetings for how little meaningful participation they actually permit. Two or three minutes at a microphone is an extraordinarily thin understanding of democratic engagement.
There are alternatives. Cities can hold facilitated small-group discussions before major votes. Residents can ask questions instead of delivering isolated speeches into a microphone. Routine procedural business can be separated from high-interest public deliberation. Meetings can offer childcare, translation services, and food. Officials can actively invite affected residents into the process instead of waiting for participation to emerge on its own. We can also consider civic lotteries to create a demographically representative pool of participants.
In Boulder, Colorado, the city piloted “deliberative study sessions” that replaced the traditional dais-and-microphone format with facilitated small-group discussions between residents and council members. Participants sat together at roundtables, asked questions, discussed trade-offs, and helped shape conversations before decisions were made. The result was a more productive discussion, stronger feelings of inclusion, and greater trust in the process.
I’ve written about the need for a new model of local government that is more resident-driven than our traditional council-manager or mayor-council systems. Nonetheless, in local government, nothing shapes the public’s experience of democracy more than the agenda itself. It is also one of the few things elected officials and administrators directly control. Redesigning public meetings will not solve every civic problem, but across thousands of municipalities, changing an agenda can reshape democratic culture for many people. If cities want to rebuild public trust, they should start there. Imagine the possibilities for what an agenda could look like, feel like, and ultimately foster a more collaborative democracy.
The Center for Democracy Innovation works closely with city councils on the Better Public Meetings program and focuses on iterating agendas to support civic engagement.
