Government Sessions Here Are Democracy-Killers

We continue to have government sessions about critical issues run by officials who consider the very people who pay their salaries somewhere between childishly dependent to toxic.

There were the state transportation officials who silenced opponents to freeway expansion, then barred them from passing out leaflets and used the police to station the leafleting blocks from the meeting room.

And did it a second time soon thereafter - - but this time, no cops were involved.

Regional planning officials and their federal highway overseers also unsuccessfully tried to morph testimony at a hearing into quiet talk to a court reporter placed where the assemblage could not listen in.

Now we have Waukesha officials at their much-touted water diversion announcement meeting accept questions from the audience - - but later provide answers without any dialogue.

Questions from council members and water utility members were accepted and answered and follow-up queries were allowed.

But from the people who sat through the presentations and officials' back-and-forth?

They got answers, such as they were, after the officials took a break and hammered out the wording behind closed doors.

Officials need to be reminded - - and perhaps the only way to do so is through formal complaints - - that the public should be fully engaged when big policy decisions and hundreds of millions of public dollars are at stake.

Part of the problem is that public officials can find public hearings tedious and aggravating - - a kabuki requirement about as pleasurable as a root canal.

But the real problem is that officials and their consultants, having spent considerable time crafting policy (and its spin and self-serving, self-referencing outcomes), too arrogantly take full ownership of the issue and any possible solution.

Highway planners forget that on their drawings are the homes and lives of real people who will be moved or disrupted.

And the water seekers in Waukesha are getting ready to spend more than $160 million, change the chemistry and volume of Underwood Creek in Wauwatosa (the return flow wastewater 'pipe,') and push for a precedent-setting exception under the new eight-state, two-country Great Lakes water compact that other states may find unacceptable, and turn down.

With so many consequences, you'd think that policy-makers handling these large matters would want to listen to what residents and taxpayers think, and encourage the presentation of alternatives or alterations arising through fa genuine public conversation.

Instead, we get one-dimensional, one-way discussions, authoritative control and downright weasily procedures - - all of which undermine local democracy and smart governance.