public meetings/hearings

[Pauline J. Alama <PJAlama@excite.com>]

I wonder whether the whole setup of public meetings and hearings is based on the assumption of a type of community that is now quite uncommon -- at least in northeast New Jersey, where I live -- a community in which all citizens read local papers, see public notices on the Town Hall, and live and work in the same community, making it easy to become aware of a local public meeting and to attend it, if it's after worktime. 

I was involved in public comment on the proposed Meadowlands Mills mall complex in the Meadowlands wetland area in southern Bergen County, New Jersey. I heard of the meeting almost by chance, and was able to attend because, unlike many of my fellow commuters from NJ to New York City, I don't work a lot of overtime. When my husband and I arrived, both the meeting room and parking were full to bursting, having been overwhelmed not only with concerned area residents but with construction workers from the other end of the state, whom the developer had made much more widely aware of the meeting than the locals were.

When there is a strong motivation to make citizens aware of something, local papers and public meetings are not the media. To collect taxes, for example, the government enlists the participation of every employer and puts forms in every post office. High schools are enlisted in making teenaged boys aware of their responsibility to register for the draft. Eye-catching public service ads about paying child support are on billboards and in train stations. This is what the government does when it really wants public participation.