Public review in practice is a mechanism for concentrated local interest groups that don't have enough democratic legitimacy to win at the ballot box to instead win via a series of Tuesday night meetings normal people don't go to. There's literature on this: public comment overwhelmingly trends negative. People show up to prevent change. They rarely show up to support it, even if they do support it; normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
I feel like this is a complicated issue, because there are two competing values here.
On one hand, fair representation is important, and the idea that every person has an equal say in how governmental decisions are made. One person one vote.
On the other hand, not everyone has the same ‘skin in the game’ for different decisions. For example, if we are deciding if a noisy building should be allowed to be built, someone who lives 5 miles away is not going to be affected by the noise, so they aren’t going to care about that. If someone comes to a community and says “we will give everyone in the community $50 if you let us build this loud building here”, then all the people out of the noise range are going to think that is a great deal. They get $50, and they don’t hear the noise anyway. Why WOULDNT they want to approve that?
So is it fair for the community to decide to make one (or a few) people miserable for years so they get $50?
So things like public review that let a “concentrated local interest group” have more power makes some sense if the thing they are reviewing also has a concentrated local impact.
Of course, there has to be some balance, otherwise we will live in a NIMBY world and nothing will be built.
People naturally have varying levels of skin in the game on various issues. They should not have varying levels of voting power. But that's essentially what public comment process does.
And your natural inclination is to assume that turnout at public comment maps to those people most impacted by an issue. But that's not at all the case! Turnout maps to those most activated by an issue, which is a function of how much free time they have (public comment is generally wealthier and older) and how fearful they are of change (public comment biases sharply towards "no").
I'm fond of asking people locally here how many of them have even considering turning out at public comment opportunities to support new apartment development. I've never met someone who has, even though people here are broadly supportive of housing. But go to a Plan or HPC meeting: there's a line of commenters out the door opposing the apartments.
Public comment is antidemocratic.
> Public comment is antidemocratic.
This is a fascinating train of thought. I get the logic, but where does it stop?
If the idea is that any situation where people are influencing the government/making decisions without absolutely everyone in the electorate being involved, is anti-democratic, at what point are people in the government allowed to make decisions without consulting everyone?
We have representatives for a reason, and part of that reason involves making decisions without having a vote (even when that decision is made by someone several rungs down the chain from the person actually elected).
I'm highly sympathetic to the idea that the actual effect of these types of "public comment" situations and hopefully anyone involved in one keeps in mind the inherent biases of who shows up, but I don't see how you can flat out deny the idea of asking people, you know, the voters, to come give opinions on decisions being made that are inbetween the actual elections.
> normal people feel, reasonably, that their civic responsibility is to vote in actual elections for the policy they support, not to spend their life in City Hall jawboning.
That's not how the vast majority of this works, and the average best case scenario on this you get to vote a politician out after they already fucked people over.
This sounds like porting assumptions about national and statewide politics into local politics, which is a totally different animal. I hear this a lot from people, and if you're referring to local electeds as "politicians fucking people over", you're probably not thinking locally. If you disagree, can we reconcile our premises? What local politics are you doing that's indicating otherwise to you?