In 1953, the Ralph M. Brown Act was signed, requiring public comment at local government meetings. While necessary at the time, this legislation has become outdated and needs to be overhauled.
At the time, Californian cities were enduring enormous change. Urban highway construction had been underway for decades, with President Eisenhower’s upcoming Federal Highway Act of 1956 promising that highways would continue to bisect communities for decades to come.
Alongside urban highways came a trend in American city planning: urban renewal. The Housing Acts of 1937 and 1949 provided the tools to revive American cities, bringing them out of the 19th century and into the future. What were seen as “blighted” neighborhoods could now be bulldozed, with more “valuable” uses — high-rises and highways — taking their place. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by these developments.
With the looming threat of displacement and many of the local officials enacting urban renewal holding their meetings in secret, something needed to change. Mike Harris, the journalist responsible for publicizing the secret meetings, and his colleague, Richard Carpenter, drafted a bill to address this issue, passing it on to Assemblymember Ralph Brown. This bill became the Brown Act.
The context of the bill’s drafting makes clear the intended purpose of public access and comment: to slow or stop projects. As admirable as that may be, it is time to investigate the purpose of public comment.
California cities are no longer paving the most disadvantaged neighborhoods with highways. Gone are the days that a rubber factory could even be thought of in a residential neighborhood. Californian decisionmakers have learned from the past and are looking toward the future, not just their pocketbooks, and it is high time that the Brown Act be refitted to accommodate these shifts in attitude. Instead of providing as much opportunity as possible for activists to stifle development, public input should provide testimony from the people to their representatives in order to guide progress.
The public comment system has two major flaws: self-selection bias and the outsized influence of organized groups.
Those who attend public comment meetings are predominantly white, elderly, male, and in jurisdictions where housing policy is an acute issue, homeowners. This discrepancy in direct contact with local government officials yields inequitable actions from the board. If a community’s voices are not heard, the board cannot address their concerns.
Organized groups are more likely to have their interests heard at local meetings. While organization is often a tool for underrepresented communities, it is worthwhile to forego the groups in favor of progress to exclude the more prevalent organizations that seek to impede it: homeowners’ associations, heritage societies, “environmentalist” groups, etc. When “Not In My Backyards” (NIMBYs) are allowed to organize, it can lead to stagnancy. This can result in a smothered housing supply and a lack of public services that benefit low-income residents.
A system that actively seeks input from a diverse range of residents along gender, racial, and economic class lines would avoid disproportionate representation. Beyond seeking diversity, a randomly distributed outreach system would reduce the impact of organized groups.
Selection bias is the overarching issue with public comment in California. As such, I propose that a sortition system be used to call members of the public to participate in public meetings. By limiting physical attendance at meetings by the general public, organized groups can be weakened at the meeting level. This would ensure that the comments that are made are truly coming from residents themselves rather than a larger agenda.
We cannot wholesale close meetings off to the public, however. Access to information presented at these meetings is essential for residents. In lieu of physical attendance, the preexisting requirement to present meetings in an online audiovisual format can be used.
To control for a lack of minority representation, quotas proportional to race, gender, and income distribution would be established. While this will sometimes lead to majorities or even supermajorities of white residents at meetings, it is more equitable than the current system in which white residents are more than twice as likely to attend political meetings as Latinx residents. This is an especially pertinent issue in California, considering that the state’s Hispanic population is, as of 2024, larger than the non-Latinx white population.
Similar to jury summons, participants would be required to attend meetings if summoned. To compensate for the loss of work hours, as most local government meetings are during typical work hours, a special class of paid leave day should be enacted into state law. Abuse of this system can be mitigated by making this leave day contingent on proof of summons. This will minimize the harm of this new policy on working-class Californians.
Having the workday off provides a secondary benefit: time for attendees to have a briefing before the meeting. During this briefing, attendees would be walked through the agenda to provide context and information. I am of the firm belief that everybody has policy opinions; they just don’t know what policies mean.
The costs of this program can vary. Since the compensation for participants will be handled as a paid day’s leave, this expense will be felt by employers rather than the state. Considering that only a minority of the population would be summoned in a given year, the financial impact of this would be minor compared to a true additional paid day off. Additional briefing staff costs can be incredibly expensive for some cities, which can be circumvented entirely by having city council and committee members provide the brief. Having them provide the brief allows for residents to put a face to their representatives, as well as for city officials to meet a full cross-section of their constituents.
The processes that would benefit the most from this program would be those involving housing and transportation development. Not every meeting needs to have an extensive system attached and it would be a cost-saving measure to limit this reform to land use and transportation meetings.
Sortition is not often used in the modern day, but a similar program, Deliberative Polling, was used in Mongolia during their 2017 constitutional reforms. Thousands of citizens were summoned, briefed on necessary materials and concepts, and solicited for commentary or suggestions. The Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab has drafted extensive materials detailing the process and applications of Deliberative Polling.
This concept is not brand new and has been tested at a national level. Why should Californians settle for less than the best governance that the world has to offer?
Understandably, most people don’t want to spend a whole day doing their civic duty. Yet, we recognize the essential role that a jury plays in fair trials. If we are willing to have jury duty to make sure people aren’t deprived of their freedoms, why not have jury duty to make sure people aren’t deprived of their cities?
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