By Dr. Alicia Barber
QUICK NOTE: One of the subjects I’ll discuss below—the Downtown Micromobility Network—is on Wednesday’s (10/11) City Council agenda, so if that interests you, you might want to read this through sooner than later. Any public comments received before 4pm on Tuesday (10/10) will be logged into the official record prior to tomorrow’s meeting.
I’ve been thinking a few topics over lately, but there’s one that has risen to the top over the past few weeks. It’s the question of what residents can do when they have serious questions about something that City staff is doing or recommending.
And just so there’s no misrepresenting what I mean by that, I’m not talking about how to criticize City staff, undermine their credibility, or question their qualifications or knowledge. I’m talking about what residents can do when they have serious questions about how City staff have formulated a certain recommendation for Council, or about a course of action City staff is undertaking that does not seem to directly proceed from a prior public vote by Council or another City board or commission.
What happens if residents with a background and interest in a certain issue believe that information in a Staff Report is insufficient, incomplete, or even inaccurate? Or if they have serious concerns about an action the City is undertaking that isn’t on the agenda of a public meeting, but is clearly moving forward? Or if a Staff Report reveals information or recommendations so soon before a Council meeting (they’re usually posted less than a week prior and sometimes far less) that residents have very little time to formulate their own thoughts on the issue, much less convey them to other residents and Council (this Tuesday edition of the Brief being a case in point)?
Questions like that, when they are sincere and well-founded, aren’t personal attacks on staff. They arise out of genuine concern. And they fall into a gray area where there is no clear mechanism for residents to engage directly with staff to get their questions answered. In Reno, all staff actions are ultimately authorized by the City Manager. As the City’s website explains: “The City of Reno has a Council-Manager form of government. This means that the Mayor and City Council make policy decisions, and the staff, at the direction of the City Manager, implements these decisions.” When actions are undertaken by City staff, there should always be a clear line back to some Council-driven policy—but obviously specific interpretations of that link as well as implementation strategies are left to the City Manager’s discretion all the time.
When the link between City actions and prior public discussion isn’t clear, residents can find themselves frustrated. The more substantive and consequential the issue—and the more people who care about it—the larger the potential degree and scope of frustration, if it seems that City staff, at the direction of the City Manager, may have exercised a bit too much latitude, if they don’t seem to have all the facts or knowledge of best practices at hand, or if they aren’t keeping Council—and by extension, the public—updated on certain items of clear public interest. And sometimes by the time an item arrives on a Council agenda, City staff has already proceeded so far in one direction that Council is left with very little time or substance to deliberate and residents feel powerless to change the course of events.
This all might sound terribly vague, so I want to move quickly into three specific issues that have come up in recent weeks that have raised concerns from residents (including me), who find themselves frustrated at what they see the City doing—or not doing—and are concerned that they’re proceeding without the transparent public input that informed decision-making and governance demand.
I’ll start with the issue that’s coming to City Council this Wednesday, October 11: downtown micromobility routes.
Downtown Micromobility Network
I last wrote about micromobility on June 12th, when the City was requesting that residents participate in a survey to determine their preferences, after the consultants hired for the Placemaking Study recommended placing bike lanes on Virginia Street (but not, I should add, to the exclusion of also putting them on Center Street).
The results of that survey were compiled in August, and on October 11th, as Mike Van Houten of Downtown Makeover wrote “the Reno City Council will consider approving and incorporating the…downtown micromobility plan, incorporating it into RTC’s larger regional transportation plan, of which RTC would then fund the construction of the micromobility network.” This is Reno also has an article about the item here.
Read the rest of The Barber Brief here.
The Barber Brief is an independent e-newsletter and blog written by Dr. Alicia Barber on the Substack platform. It is reposted by This Is Reno with her permission.
