Throughout the semester I have attended several public meetings. For this class I attended the FasTracks East Corridor meeting hosted by the RTD and DTP. I was somewhat surprised in that the meeting had been advertised as both an "update" and a "workshop". This led me to assume there would be some degree of public participation. It turned out there was good participation in the form of questions by attendees. It certainly wasn't a workshop. My memo doesn't challenge Booher's arguments for the simple fact that the meeting was not part of a decision-making process; it was an update and opportunity for citizens to ask questions of the experts involved in the project. Nor to my recommendations have anything to do with Feinstein's perspective. My main recommendation in the memo was simply to advertise better/more clearly and to understand the audience better.
I've also been to several rural city council and development board meetings throughout the semester. These were much more formal and displayed many of Booher's recommendations. These proceedings always meet the requirements for open meeting laws, diligently posting agendas around the community and in local newspapers. Robert's rules of order are strictly followed to avoid any procedural issues. There is an abundance of the participants' capacity to plan collaboratively. These folks are elected to positions of leadership by their peers, volunteer on several boards each and are involved in many civic groups together; They work quite well with one another.
As a side note, thank you everyone for your kind words of encouragement last week.
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