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1/ON AUTHENTIC COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT. There's plenty to discuss with regard to community engagement/community voice. Our community issues can't be reduced to simple calculations about the number of people who are able to attend/speak at any given meeting.
2/We ought to want our leaders and gov't staff to take meaningful steps to engage - and listen. But as residents we can also understand that there are people on each side of most issues. And people who aren't at a meeting still get to be heard through their representatives
3/There are plenty of ways to engage and we should constantly be evolving how we do it. But also we should respect each other enough to be honest that engagement does not always mean doing what the most voices in a given room want. We have 3.2 million people in this region
4/In my view, we owe it to each other to be as transparent as possible. Some land uses are necessary but unpopular no matter what you do. This can't possibly mean we shouldn't have those uses because the people who need them matter, too.
5/If our leaders only listened to the largest number of voices, people who are poor or have serious physical or behavioral health needs or who have been incarcerated would often be left voiceless. Engaging these decisions in public is one benefit of our representative democracy
