Asymmetry in small government
At every planning hearing I've watched, the same lopsided room shows up. On one side, a developer with an attorney. They've read every page of the packet. They paid people to read every page of the packet. On the other side, a homeowner who heard about the hearing from a neighbor two days ago, who skimmed the agenda but couldn't open the staff report PDF on their phone, and who is going to speak for three minutes about a project they understand mostly through rumor.
This is not a complaint about developers or citizens. Developers do what any rational party does when the rules reward thorough preparation: they prepare thoroughly. The asymmetry is structural. It's baked into how local government publishes information.
What "public records" actually means in practice
The records are public in the legal sense: a citizen can technically obtain them. The records are not accessible in any practical sense:
- The agenda is a PDF, often 200+ pages, posted to a Document Center page with no notification.
- Linked staff reports use file numbers (Z-25-014) that mean nothing unless you've been tracking the case.
- The zoning code is split across a hosted system on the town website that's hard to search and harder to deep-link.
- The history of a property - every prior application, every condition, every approval - exists across years of meeting minutes, none of which cross-reference each other.
A motivated citizen can, in principle, reconstruct the whole picture. They'll need to know which Document Center page to visit, which file numbers are relevant, which Chapter and section of the code applies, and how to read a staff recommendation. The cost in hours is high. The cost is not high for the attorney, because the attorney's hours are billable to the developer.
The downstream effect
When only one side of the room has read the packet, the hearing isn't a discussion. It's a presentation followed by reactions. The informed party makes detailed arguments about specific sections; the uninformed party makes general arguments about character and concern. The board, doing its job, evaluates the case in front of it. The case in front of it is shaped by who came prepared.
This is not bad faith on anyone's part. The developer is making the case they're entitled to make. The citizen is making the case they're capable of making in the time they had. The system produces the asymmetry whether or not the participants intend it.
What helps
Three things would close the gap, none of them partisan:
- Discoverability. A resident searches for their street and finds every public matter touching it: applications, parcels, conditions, meetings. Not a separate trip to seven different town pages.
- Plain summaries. A two-sentence summary of what the application is asking for, drawn straight from the staff report, no jargon.
- History. What did the board do last time on this kind of case? Last year? Last five years? The record exists; nobody can find it.
- Process. An explicit description of the application process, the current step of the process and the next steps involved in the process, and which actions are available to both parties during each step.
None of this requires changing the substance of the rules or the hearings. It changes the cost of preparing for them.
The boring conclusion
I don't think there's a brilliant insight here. The technology to make public records actually accessible has existed for fifteen years. The reason it hasn't happened in most small municipalities is that nobody is paid to make it happen. Town staff are doing their jobs; their jobs do not include building search tools. Civic-tech volunteers do build search tools, but they don't stay. The records keep getting published the way they always have.
OpenPlanning is a small bet that someone should just do this. Not as a volunteer project, not as a one-off civic hack, but as a thing that exists and works in the towns it operates in. We're starting with one town. We'll see where it goes from there.