January 10, 2024 Dena Jensen

Here’s a little update on part of the January 8, 2023 Bellingham City Council Committee of the Whole meeting related to a couple community areas of interest.

Old and New Business (for which topics are not shown on the agenda ahead of time) took up most of the hour-long meeting. This was where the first 3 items on the Consent Agenda for the evening were pulled out for further discussion by Council Member Stone, including the one about a contract for a Bellingham Police Departement Drug and Crime Prevention Officer that is housed within the Bellingham Housing Authority.

Apparently it’s a situation similar to the situation with Operation Stonegarden Grants (which is United States Department of Homeland Security funding used by Whatcom County and City of Bellingham for various law enforcement items) where the City has had this arrangement between the Bellingham Housing Authority and the Bellingham Police Department for 3 years for a BPD Drug officer housed within the Housing Authority, and this is just a re-up of the HUD contract for it. 

In other words, it is an issue that has been worthy of concern the whole time but maybe just hasn’t received a lot of air time and that City Council just considers business as usual currently.

Interlocal agreements between the City and WhatCOMM and with Whatcom County for the GRACE program were the other items pulled from the consent agenda for discussion. The entire Consent Agenda, including those three items that were discussed, was approved 6-0, with Council Member Jace Cotton abstaining, at the evening Council Meeting.

It also turned out Old and New Business started out with a relatively long conversation about Open Public Comment, which it seemed like after all the discussion, resulted in fairly similar features to what the City Council has had during 2023, except that the period quoted for comment was raised from 30 minutes to an hour and the sign up for online commenting was shortened to be the same as sign up for in-person – during the half hour before the meeting starts, I think.

What was most notable to me though, especially since I had written to Engage Bellingham about this topic last week and to City Council on Monday morning, forwarding that former email to Engage Bellingham, was that public comment through Engage Bellingham is no longer being taken. 

Even more notable though was that the reason given according to Council Member Lilliquist was that “it was almost not used,”  and according to City of Bellingham Communications Director Janice Keller:

“Council Members were not finding it as useful as simply promoting the opportunity to telephone Council Members and email Council Members directly. And so we were trying to find ways that were accessible to the public and widely used and easily accessed by you all [speaking to Council Members] and Engage Bellingham didn’t seem to be something you were using.”

Meanwhile, it was also said during the open public comment discussion, that the 30 minute period formerly allotted for that oral comment was representative of a common amount of public comment – likely around 10 comments at 3 minutes each – that was offered during their meetings.

I looked at the Engage Bellingham record of past meeting comments, and for 2023 there was only one meeting where no one left a comment, and for the other meetings the counts going backwards starting in December were: 8, 1, 3, 1, 0, 4, 9, 2, 3, 6, 22, 57, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 89, 6, 8, 1, 1, 9, 3. That’s 240 comments total, which averaged out is 10 comments per meeting. And the counts show a pretty regular ebb and flow that were likely the result of topics that were more and less of interest during that year.

It was most concerning to me to hear that it was known by City staff that Council Members weren’t using Engage Bellingham in contrast to the fact that it has been something pretty strongly promoted as a compensation for the fact that Open Public Comment at meetings had been made less accessible to the community to greater (during the critical pandemic years when it wasn’t recorded or included during regular City Council meetings) and lesser degrees (the last year or two when it was moved to the end of the meeting and there was a greater attempt to insist on a 30 minute period for comment, even though that seemed to loosen more and more.)

I had thought that at one point I had heard it said by someone at the City that the Engage Bellingham comments were actually sent to Council Member inboxes, but I don’t know where I’d find that now. But then, of course there’s also the “Who’s Listening” sidebar which is on the Engage Bellingham City Council public comment page shown in the screen shot I’m attaching to this post in contrast with it being said that City Council Members weren’t using it.

Here’s a link to the recording of the Old and New Business section of the January 8, 2024 Committee of the Whole meeting: https://youtu.be/KyXcFD1vnHM?si=R2Pdj1EBkSYZE-0Y&t=881

And for anyone wanting to look at the past comments on City Council meetings that are still on the Engage Bellingham website, here is the link that, so far, can only be found on the Site Map for that website: https://engagebellingham.org/council-public-comment?page=1