The Only Thing Citizens Who Volunteer Hear Is Crickets Chirping
Opinion
The City of Emeryville has been on a tear of late, trying to fill vacancies on various civic committees. They've notified residents of the importance of civic engagement and how we can all craft a better city together. All this requires ordinary citizens to step up and offer to help by giving of their time and join the committees that help run our town.
Council member Jennifer West has been especially vocal about this, imploring residents to become involved on her web blog and at various forums.
With all these appeals from the city for residents to listen to their better angels you would think that the city itself could summon its own sense of civic engagement and at least thank those residents who were not selected to committee positions for which they volunteered. They don't even bother to notify those who weren't selected.
A simple notice, such as: "Thank you for showing an interest in our town when you applied for the xxxxx committee. We're sorry but you were not selected at this time but we hope you will try again in the future" doesn't seem like such a hard thing for the city to do but apparently it is. More than a year has passed since this simple request was made for City Hall to at least notify the people who weren't selected, but apparently the city feels this issue is unimportant. Instead, all the city offers those who are not selected for committees is stony silence.
We feel that this is not the way to build citizen involvement and moreover, it's just plain rude. Citizens should be thanked for volunteering of their time to help improve our town, not given the cold shoulder.
Don't you get it? Those kept off committees are kept off because Nora Davis doesn't like them. Why should the people you don't like be thanked?
ReplyDeleteYou know right at the Council meeting who has been appointed to the committee. Why would you apply for a committee and then not go to the Council meeting to see who was appointed?
ReplyDeleteTrue, true; applicants could attend the city council meeting where they vote on appointments, but then again so too could the city notify those not selected. It's pretty telling of the culture at City Hall that a simple notification is not forthcoming. How difficult is it to send out a notification?
ReplyDeleteWhat I like is how qualified and engaged CITY RESIDENTS who apply for open slots on committees are rejected so that Nora Davis' out of town cronies can dominate the committees and approve policies that serve only out of town business interests and detract from Emeryville's livability.
ReplyDelete