Why Bother Showing Up?

The Road District Meetings That Make “Public Participation” a Joke

If you live in a local road district and you’ve ever thought, “Maybe I should go to the board meeting and speak up,” let me save you the gas money and the headache.

It’s pointless.

Here’s what actually happens once you walk through those doors:

The board changes the rules in the middle of the meeting—whatever suits them at the moment. One minute there’s a three-minute public comment limit; the next minute they’re adding new restrictions on the fly because someone’s question hit a little too close to home.

Public comment is deliberately scheduled before the board discusses anything of substance. You’re expected to comment on agenda items you haven’t heard the board talk about yet. By the time real decisions are made, the public has already been ushered out of the conversation.

During the few minutes you are allowed to speak, board members interrupt you, talk over you, and run the clock down. Ask them to let you finish your sentence? That’s when the real show starts.

And then comes the final insult: the official meeting minutes.

In those minutes, the people who politely asked the board to stop interrupting during their allotted public comment time are described as “rabble rousers” who were “attempting to disrupt the meeting.” The board members who were cutting people off and raising their voices? They come across as calm, professional stewards of the public trust.

It’s not just bad manners. It’s a system designed to make sure your voice never actually matters.

Worse still, the board has written bylaws that let them disqualify anyone they label as “causing trouble” from running for office—never mind what state law actually says about who can serve. They’ve created their own little protected club, and the public is only invited in so they can check the “we held a meeting” box.

Look, in a normal, functioning democracy, attending public meetings makes sense. Showing up, being heard, holding officials accountable—that’s how it’s supposed to work.

But when the deck is this stacked, when the rules are rewritten on the spot, when your comments are pre-emptively ignored and then retroactively smeared in the minutes, attending isn’t civic duty.

It’s theater. Expensive, frustrating, soul-crushing theater.

And the board knows it.

So the next time the meeting notice hits your mailbox, feel free to stay home. Spend that evening with your family, or fixing the pothole in front of your own house that the district still hasn’t addressed.

Because until the board decides to run fair meetings instead of rigged ones, showing up doesn’t change anything.

It just gives them another chance to prove the system is broken.