The officials who sit through public comment at the county budget hearing and privately describe it as theatre are right about the comments. I have listened to eleven years of them. A large share are about things the county does not control, a large share are about a grievance from a previous decade, and a meaningful share are from four people who come to everything.
I have heard commissioners say some version of this in a parking lot and I did not think they were being contemptuous. They were being accurate.
Here is what I think follows, which is not what they think follows.
The draft budget is published seventy-two hours before the hearing. It is about two hundred pages. The hearing is at ten in the morning on a Tuesday.
A person who wanted to make an informed comment would have to obtain a two-hundred-page document on a Saturday, understand enough of a governmental fund structure to locate the thing they care about, work out what changed from last year — which requires last year's document, which is somewhere else — form a view, and take a Tuesday morning off.
The comments are uninformed because the process is a machine for producing uninformed comments. Given seventy-two hours and two hundred pages, the only people who can comment substantively are people who already know the budget: staff, the four regulars, and anybody paid to follow it. Everyone else is left with the thing they can speak to without preparation, which is a grievance.
And then the uninformedness of the comments becomes the argument for not doing anything differently. If public comment produces nothing useful, why extend it, why publicise it, why move the hearing to an evening. The quality of the input justifies the design that determined it.
Now the part where I have to concede more than I want to, because the officials have a second argument and it is better than the first.
Publishing the draft earlier is not free. A budget draft at four weeks is a different document from a budget draft at seventy-two hours — it is less settled, numbers move, departments are still negotiating. Publish at four weeks and you publish figures that will change, and every change becomes a story about a cut that was proposed and withdrawn, and the negotiation moves out of the room and into the newspaper, and it gets harder rather than easier to do the actual work. I have watched a version of this happen with a school budget in a neighbouring county and it was not an improvement for anybody.
That is a real cost and any proposal that ignores it deserves to lose.
So the ask has to be shaped around it, and I think it can be. Do not publish the draft earlier. Publish, four weeks out, the things that are not in flux: the departmental totals from last year, what the county is legally required to fund, the three or four decisions the commission knows it will have to make, stated as questions. That document is stable, it is short, it could be four pages, and it is what a person would need in order to arrive with something to say.
The four regulars would still come. But the hearing would contain, for the first time, people who had read something.
I have proposed this twice. The response the second time was that nobody would read it, and I said that we do not currently know that, and the commissioner said, fairly, that in his experience nobody reads anything — and then he asked me how many people had read my newsletter, which was a good question and which I answered honestly, and the number did not help me.
