The City of Whitefish recently hosted two community visioning sessions to inform the 2045 growth policy update. By offering multiple days, evening times, and free childcare, the city supported broad public engagement.
We need City Council to keep protecting participation, by ensuring that the board overseeing this process keeps meetings accessible to the community. I’ve attended and watched many growth policy meetings, and the following issues are concerning.
Growth policy sections are revisited so many times that meetings become inaccessible to working people and they disengage. Two or three meetings should be sufficient for a topic. Some community members receive more space to comment than others. Some groups are allowed to rewrite chapters. The same rules should apply to everybody. Our city staff – the neutral third party – is ignored, even when their comments are critical to the policy.
We, the public, have engaged in the process. We need a system that’s open and fair for everyone and we need City Council to ensure that this process isn’t overly burdensome for the community.
Marti Brandt
Whitefish