How to Hold a Sham Public Hearing

Politicians ask for 'public input' without wanting any public input.

Photo credit: Evan Forester

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This week, I testified at a more than 12-hour hearing (yes, you read that right) regarding Washington, D.C.’s, proposed deal to subsidize a new stadium for the NFL’s Washington Commanders. If approved, it would be the largest professional sports subsidy in U.S. history, inclusive of not just funds to build the stadium itself, but massive tax breaks, redevelopment rights, and land giveaways that will enable the Commanders ownership to control and profit from the area around the stadium for decades without paying into the public coffers in any way commensurate with the public benefits they’ll receive.

It will come as no surprise, then, that I am opposed to the deal. Here’s my testimony, if you care to watch.

This piece though, is not about the Commanders stadium deal, specifically: It’s about how politicians pretend to solicit public input on major local economic development projects without actually soliciting public input, creating a sham process meant to grease the skids for corporate giveaways.

Many of these tactics were on display at the D.C. hearing, so while I’ve delved into this subject before, it seemed worth revisiting. Below are just some of the various ways to tell if the “public” meeting or hearing you’re attending is merely a box-checking exercise that allows elected officials to say they solicited public input without actually having to spend any brain power contemplating what the public had to say.

1. Provide insufficient time at an inconvenient hour: Despite more than 500 people registering to speak at the D.C. hearing, the public was still only granted one day of testimony, hence the very lengthy meeting. And the 10 a.m. start time ensured that many people who had to be at work were presumably precluded from registering at all, and the lengthy proceedings surely persuaded some folks who had intended to testify to skip out. This is a very common tactic to ensure public meetings exclude much of the public: Hold them at a time at which most normal people can’t go. This tactic is often compounded by making it difficult to determine exactly when each individual’s testimony will be, requiring folks to hang around all day — or at least for several hours — further depressing turnout. Finally, insufficient time ensures the hearing gets treated like an assembly line and that elected officials don’t ask any questions, because they want to get home for dinner or to see their kids or whatever else more than they want to learn anything.

2. Let the public speak — to no one: For the vast majority of the D.C. hearing, just one member of the council was present, whose job was to ensure the process kept moving. The other 11 current council members were nowhere to be seen. This is, again, a common tactic: Have the public speak, but not to anyone actually in power. (See here for a similar situation at a public meeting regarding an Amazon warehouse.) Yes, elected members can monitor hearings online or send staff, but it’s a pretty clear signal that elected officials don’t actually care about testimony if they can’t even be bothered to sit still and listen to it. And they certainly can’t ask follow-up questions if they aren’t in the room.

3. Jumble up the messengers: A real public hearing designed to solicit useful information will be organized, with people who have similar viewpoints or expertise grouped together to speak. A public hearing designed to check boxes does the opposite, leaving the speaking list a jumble, so that no coherent threads of testimony ever emerge and no issue gets more than a passing examination. 500 people testifying in no discernible order — some in support of the deal, some against, some speaking on environmental issues, some on financing, some on youth sports, some on jobs guarantees, some on nothing at all — with some subjects coming up, disappearing, and then re-emerging with another random person hours later is no way to acquire meaningful information. The worst example I’ve seen of this is actually in Connecticut, where they assign a random testimony order for state legislative bill hearings, and put multiple bills on the docket, so people not only are discussing different topics but completely different pieces of legislation, all in a jumble. This type of setup makes extracting relevant information incredibly difficult — which seems to be the point.

4. Keep the details a secret: D.C. City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson announced ahead of the public hearing that he had struck a deal with the team that the council would vote on three days after said hearing. Crucially, he didn’t release any actual text or key critical details until after the public hearing had already happened. So a lot of us were left testifying not to any specifics but to vague platitudes he put out in a social media post. It should be clear that announcing a thing elected officials will be voting on before a public hearing, but releasing the text after said hearing, is evidence the public’s input was never going to be included.

I’m sure I’m missing some popular tactics, but if you notice any of these occurring in government bodies in your community, it’s a pretty sure bet you’re being subjected to a sham public hearing that isn’t actually designed to determine where the public’s sentiment is, but simply enable elected officials to say the public had it’s moment in front of a microphone.

And again, in the case of D.C., this was all done in order to grease the skids for the largest public stadium subsidy in American history.

Look, I get that elected officials are under no obligation to allow for public testimony at all (except in places where they are so bound by statute), but a sham public hearing is almost more insulting, providing the veneer of direct democracy where none really exists. Have other examples of this I should know about? Give a shout in the comments.

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UPDATE: A federal judge has put on hold Arkansas’ groundbreaking law to break up pharmacy benefit manager middlemen. The state plans to appeal. You can read background on this issue here and here.

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UPDATE II: I’ve been, as regular readers know, a big booster of a public electronic tax filing system that can challenge the grip Intuit and H&R Block have on tax preparation. The Biden administration started up a public program — Direct File — which was popular and effective, but the Trump administration has confirmed it will kill the program at the behest of those tax prep corporations.

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SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION: I was on NPR’s Marketplace last week discussing state efforts to rein in surveillance pricing. You can listen to the segment here and read my surveillance pricing explainer here.

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ANTI-MONOPOLY SUMMIT: The third annual American Economic Liberties Project Anti-Monopoly Summit will be on Sept. 15 and 16th, in Washington, D.C., and early bird registration is open now. You can register here.

Speakers this year will include: Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy; Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego; Pennsylvania Rep. Chris Deluzio; former FTC Chair Lina Khan; and for you state-policy-interested folks, Minnesota State Rep. Emma Greenman and Colorado State Rep. Emily Sirota.

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SIMPLY STATED: Here are links to a few stories that caught my eye this week.

• “With no public debate, Louisiana enacts sales tax break on luxury boats.”

• More state legislators from across the political spectrum are attempting to crack down on fraudulent “crypto ATMs.”

• New York Lt. Gov Antonio Delgado — who is running for governor — called for “an overhaul of the over $10 billion we give away annually through so-called economic development incentives to select businesses with no real return on investment.”

• Two Arkansas cities seem to be competing against each other for a publicly-subsidized data center.

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— Pat Garofalo