Public Comment

Since the city has moved to Zoom meetings, the city can do better to allow participation by using Zoom's features. The current manner of conducting meetings leaves residents with the impression that our participation is not wanted or valued.  

• Use your large capacity Zoom account for topics which you know to be controversial. While many council committee meetings may not be well attended, the number of emails and social media shares should have alerted the authors of the Quadplex item to the level of interest in this topic. Higher capacity zoom accounts are inexpensive for the city. For just $50 more a year than you are currently paying, you can have a capacity of 300 participants.
• Livestream events to Facebook, You tube or a custom Facebook Live, YouTube custom streaming service. and post this information in advance, so folks who want to listen but don't need to speak can still participate. It is inexcusable that you didn't livestream the Land-Use meeting, after people were locked out due to capacity. Most folks who tried to log in would have given up.
• Show us residents the zoom participants. Let us know how many callers are waiting to speak.
• Open the chat and post important links there (such as the link to the supplemental agenda material. If the city believes that public comments would become inappropriate, Zoom allows you to either delete inappropriate comments or make the chat one way... host only.
• If using the webinar format you have many other features you are not utilizing including polling, Q&A and post survey links to get more feel of your callers opinions.

Finally, I was disappointed that many folks calling in today to support the Quadplex item were allowed to spend their time attacking the character and values of the folks calling in to ask for improvements to the item. Furthermore, their attacks were not admonished by the chair. It's a shame that the pro-development camp didn't have something more useful to say about the proposal itself.