Are town hall meetings about to suffer the same unsettling fate as the woolly mammoth and the dinosaurs faced?
A sparse crowd of 50 Squamish residents recently shuffled into the Roundhouse at the West Coast Railway Heritage Park for a chance to lock horns with council and to help micromanage the district. This attendance anomaly has been closely scrutinized by a number of observers. Terrill Patterson, our resident recycling expert and perennial council watchdog, declared that in a community with a population upwards of 15,000 souls, the turnout was embarrassing. Beverly Carson, who is a founder of the Brackendale Owners and Tenants Association, noted that the recent round of town hall assemblies perpetually attracted the same familiar circle of politically inclined locals.
Some pundits attributed the low attendance to the allure of a televised Vancouver Canucks game. But the need to connect with our hockey gods is only a superficial explanation for the thin turnout.
Last November, this exercise in civic engagement was already having difficulties putting bums in the seats. Upwards of two-thirds of the Eagle Eye Theatre was empty and at least a quarter of attendees were affiliated with the media, or the district.
This past spring, there were more municipal staff members on hand than residents for a budget-related town hall gathering at the Seniors Centre.
Local wags blame the dismal turnouts on various factors ranging from simple apathy to this council's habit of making more and more decisions in-camera, thereby creating an atmosphere of secrecy and exclusion.
Some pundits wonder how much of the town hall process is window dressing and how many of the suggestions from attendees are actually acted on by decision makers.
Although one of this administration's major priorities has been to engage residents in meaningful dialogue, relatively few have been choosing to feast at the high table of communication laid on by Municipal Hall.
Or so it would appear. A mere two days after the thinly attended town hall assembly, a standing room only crowd numbering well over 250 residents packed the Sea to Sky Hotel to hear about the long awaited sub-area plan for the proposed Squamish Oceanfront development.
A number of factors account for the attendance discrepancy between the two gatherings.
Clearly, the Oceanfront development issue is more focused than the open-ended town hall meetings. The Oceanfront summit dealt with the results of years of deliberations and considerable expenditure of time and money.
This is a specific plan already on the table, the outcome of which will be the biggest district-driven enterprise this community has seen since the railway arrived at the turn of the last century.
In other words, there was something concrete and pressing here into which residents, all of whom are stakeholders in one way or another, could sink their teeth.
In the meantime, the more generic version of the town hall concept appears to be suffering from the law of diminishing returns. Council needs to find a way to make these events meaningful or allow them to pass into extinction.
