Every month, in board rooms from Osseo to Trempealeau, a chairperson looks up from the agenda and asks whether anyone wishes to address the board. Most nights, nobody does. When somebody finally stands up, the difference between being heard and being humored often comes down to a handful of habits that clerks and supervisors say they can spot in the first 30 seconds.
Start with the sign-in sheet. Nearly every board in the county requires speakers to register before the meeting is called to order, usually on a clipboard near the door. “If your name isn’t on the sheet, I can’t put you in the record, and half the time the chair won’t call on you,” said Diane Kubarski, the village clerk in Ettrick. “Get there ten minutes early. That clipboard is the whole ballgame.”
Then respect the clock. Three minutes is standard, and it is shorter than it sounds — roughly 400 spoken words — a typed page and a half, double-spaced. Address the chair, not the audience and not the supervisor you are upset with. State your name and where you live. Then make one point.
“One point, made well, beats five points made fast,” said Gerald Amundson, a county supervisor from the Blair area who has sat through 14 years of public comment. “When someone comes in with a single question and a single request, I write it down. When they come in with a grievance sampler, I mostly remember the tone.”
One point, made well, beats five points made fast.
Gerald Amundson, county supervisor
Bring copies. A one-page handout — enough for every board member plus the clerk — outlasts anything said aloud, because it goes home in the packet. End by asking for a specific action: put the item on next month’s agenda, request a staff report, table the vote until the town boards respond. “Ask for something a board can actually do,” Amundson said. “We can’t fix your neighbor. We can direct the highway commissioner to look at your culvert.”
Know the legal limits, too. Under Wisconsin’s open meetings law, a board generally cannot deliberate or act on a matter that was not on the posted agenda. Public comment is for raising issues, not resolving them, and a chair who says “we can’t discuss that tonight” is usually following the law rather than dodging the question. The fix is simple: follow up in writing to the clerk and ask that the matter be placed on a future agenda. Paper creates obligations that applause does not.
Nobody in the county knows this better than Wendell Pratt of rural Galesville, who by his own count has addressed the county board 74 times since 2011 and considers three minutes a luxury. “The board doesn’t owe you agreement,” Pratt said. “It owes you a listen. Your job is to make the listening easy and the ignoring hard.”
He recommends one more thing: come back. “The first time, you’re a complaint,” Pratt said. “The fourth time, you’re a constituency.”