Town Hall Meeting a one-sided sideshow
Coma-inducing is a phrase that comes to mind
-- John Patten, 02/12/06
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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This year's Town Hall Meeting had to be the biggest municipal yankathon in memory. In wanting to avoid those sweat-filled moments when citizens ask unexpected and pointed questions, council opted for maximum crowd control: keep 'em quiet, don't let 'em have a word in edgewise and don't say anything substantive.

Questions were e-mailed in advance to city hall and the city picked which questions to answer. This led to one of the most incredibly boring and uninformative presentations that city hall has ever put on. The audience sat for two hours as council droned on and on and on, milking the easy questions and quickly glossing over any problematic ones. By the end of the first hour, almost half of the crowd had left. I was standing near the exit door and more often than not I heard the muttered phrase "This is bullshit" as people were exiting.

At the end of the meeting, finally, people were able to address council directly, thus turning the event into an actual town meeting. By that time, few cared. Venice resident Clay Coyle complained about the process a bit, but few of the original audience members were still around to hear him.

The only substantive thing that came out of the meeting was an open invitation to developer Mike Miller to please come back with another pitch for his vision of downtown's future towers. The rest of the meeting was filled with insufferable droning, quite a bit of which came from Councilman John Simmonds. Simmonds waxed eloquently (I think) on nearly every subject that was brought up. I have no clue what he said as his microphone's volume was turned so far down that his comments were indecipherable. Adding to this were the crowd noises as the audience had given up on listening to this babble and instead were involved in their own animated discussions.

You want to talk about hot topics? Take this thorny question that council took the time to consider:

From: S. Elwood <wangelwood@aol.com>
Subject: suggested topic- town hall meeting Feb. 6

In order to keep a small town feel- why don't we separate the part of Venice west of the inter coastal [sic] from the rest of Venice and create the Town of Venice Beach. A throwback to what Venice was meant to be with our own government, like the town of Longboat Key or Ana Maria [sic].

We're talking riveting, cutting-edge political rhetoric here.

Actually, I support this idea. It's an impossible and incredibly naive proposition, but it has its merits. That's what I wrote to the submitter of the question, anyway:

From: J. Patten <jpatten@veniceflorida.com>
To: S. Elwood <wangelwood@aol.com>
Subject: Venice town hall meeting

I read with interest your e-mail, suggesting that the City of Venice's borders be reduced to incorporate only the island. I fully support this. As a city resident who lives off-island, I couldn't be more thrilled at the thought of secession. You can have city hall, keep it, cherish it, rename it as the municipal asylum. Of course this means that the county will have to take over the police and the utilities departments, but it's a small cost to pay for us sane off-islanders to be freed from under city hall's reign.

I suggest starting a web site. Let me know if I can be of any help.

As to council, I offer this: next time you have a town hall meeting, invite the town to actually participate in the give and take. It is, after all, our town too.

Otherwise, if you want to stick to your current approach, just go into a studio and video-tape the presentation without the unnecessary audience. We'll drop by city hall and buy a DVD if we're interested.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.