Venues
One of my client communities will be having a very controversial public hearing. The last time we had a public hearing on this topic we changed the venue before we even prepared the notices. However, we can not find a venue large enough to hold the number of people who showed up at the last meeting as they are all booked... which means it gets moved back to the regular venue.
How does your community deal with meetings that are too large to accommodate the regular venue?
Me: "I am sorry, but the Ordinance and the Master Plan does not permit that at this time. But if you would like to request amendments, this 355 page document outlines the procedure. You will need…. (CLIPPED TO ACCOMMODATE LIMIT) …. It will likely take 36 to 48 months to get final approvals. Then you can submit for a building permit and break ground Would you like to get started with the process?
Applicant: "Geeze, a simple No you can't do that would have worked"
Overflow room with closed-circuit TV. Latecomers hate it but we did our best... you snooze, you lose. Let the fire marshal take the heat by making the announcements. Anyone complains, ask them for a special levy for larger city facilities.
Controversial stuff I try to set up the meeting to be in a local church... keeps the tempers a bit cooler.
The two times I've had this issue was with wind turbines and with a proposed mini home park. With the wind turbines it was at our county office and we had overflow rooms with straming TV and sound. For the mini home opark there was no way we were going to get away with not holding the meeting in the community, which unfortunately only had a small community centre. We rented a speaker system and had an overflow room, but that still wasn't enough to accommodate everyone within fire code so we ended up having to hold a second night. To be honest, the second night was a bit of a mess because many people who had been to the first one came back for the second night with rebuttals and stuff and it got really drawn out, redundant, and adversarial. If I had to do it again I think we'd take names and only let new people come to the second night or something.
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