Listening to the people

In all my years of covering local government, one of the rarest sights is an elected board going back and changing its mind on a topic after hearing from the public.

Usually public hearings are a formality, something a board does so it can say it gathered feedback before it goes on to do what it was going to do all along.

But this week, in a surprising twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan proud, the Campbell County School Board approved a bell-to-bell ban for high schoolers. This was after the board had previously voted 4-3 in favor of a total ban.

The public response leaned heavily against a full ban, including the anonymous survey and the very not anonymous public hearings, the second of which had 17 people speak, all opposing the full ban.

Now, K-8 students will have a total ban, which makes sense. If there is some way the president can be treated the same way, I think a lot of our problems would be solved.

But to prohibit high schoolers from looking on their phones during lunch and in between classes is not realistic. Complain about the kids all you want, but many adults would probably throw a tantrum if you took their phone away for an hour.

I have to applaud the two school board members, Rollo Williams and Tim Hallinan, who changed their votes. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.

Listening to public opinion is an art, not a science, however.

The commissioners recently overruled the county planning commission on a rezoning case. According to the minutes of a March 19 planning meeting, Jack Clary, who serves on the county planning commission, said that because there was also one complaint — just one — that was made, he felt that was enough to justify not approving the request.

This complainant, for whatever reason, did not submit the complaint in writing, nor did they show up to the meeting to voice their concerns.

Hearsay doesn’t hold up in court, and apparently it’s not effective in zoning cases, either, and the county commissioners approved the request.

Let's go back to this idea that all it takes is one complaint to justify a decision. Interestingly, one year ago, when Clary made the case for Gillette Reproductive Health to get its 1% funding cut, he dismissed a petition that had garnered several hundred signatures.

“As I look at it, 500 or 600 signatures – that’s not a large constituent (sic) to vote on this idea. We got 30,000 people,” he said at the time.

And last month, when the city council postponed approval of Hoskinson’s zoning request for a 45-acre piece of land, Clary worried that this would hurt the city planning commission’s feelings, since that board did recommend approval of that request. But one person voiced his opposition at two public meetings. I thought that’s all it took to justify rejecting a zoning request.

Some consistency would be nice.

Circling back to the cellphone ban, we’ll see how this goes. Maybe a year from now the school board will go back and take another look at the policy. But for now, they did the right thing. They listened to the people.

And that’s what it’s all about.

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