Summary:
- Local citizen advisory boards tend to empower the most privileged residents
- Most people do not have the time or resources to volunteer for local government involvement
- Outsourcing decision making authority to volunteer boards removes accountability for local leaders
Across North Carolina, and America as a whole, a large swath of local governance is dominated by local citizens’ advisory boards. These go by many names, but usually entail a group of private citizens who volunteer (or volunteer-to-be-appointed by an elected leader) for a board or commission that meets to give its opinion on some aspect of local governance. To varying degrees, local advisory boards like these frequently have significant power in influencing official decisionmaking. There are hundreds of such boards across our state, focusing on different issues from housing, transportation, parks and greenways to water and sewage.
Unfortunately, in too many cases, unelected bodies like these are given (or have assumed) inappropriate levels of authority and influence from local elected leaders, and those leaders should rethink their scope.
Advisory boards like these are created with good intentions. Local government is the smallest form of government and typically places a large amount of emphasis on community feedback in policy making – often required by state and the federal governments as a funding requirement. In theory, these boards and commissions allow everyday residents to give valuable input on policy decisions, acting as liaisons for their community. Ideally, these boards would be accessible to anyone with the interest and expertise; a form of direct democracy by the people for the people.
But in practice, these boards too often run into the same problems that so much of local government already does. By requiring a significant investment of volunteer time, they inherently privilege the input of a minority of residents who have the means of, and interest in, providing it. In many cases, this results in a wealthier, whiter, and older advisory board composition than the community as a whole.
Take, for example, a recent survey done in Chapel Hill over a measure to allow multi-family housing to be built “by right.” The original policy put forth by staff would have allowed up to a quadplex to be built without council approval in most parts of the town. Despite being a university town with 30,000 students, not a single person under the age of 26 filled out the feedback survey. The people who filled out the survey were significantly whiter (>70%) and older (57% over 46 years old) than the community as a whole – and indicated that they were worried about “grad student parties.” In short: input by a vocal minority of wealthy homeowners whose neighborhoods would be largely unaffected by the policy led the town to significantly scale back a housing policy that would primarily benefit younger, low income residents. (Chapel Hill Town Councilor Karen Stegman has written elegantly about this dynamic in her community.)
These boards often meet for long hours in the evening, multiple times a month, and are volunteer positions with required materials that need to be read and understood ahead of the meetings. Those meeting lengths are highly unpredictable. Where board membership is not purely a volunteer matter, getting appointed to one can often require knowing elected officials or current board members who can nominate or vouch for you.
This results in a high barrier of entry: not having childcare, working a night/evening shift or multiple jobs, not having access to a car or transit, and simply not having the connections required to even get on the board means that too often these advisory boards are wildly unrepresentative of the community as a whole. In the most extreme scenarios, these boards become de facto proxies of existing advocacy groups, allowing them to have heavy influence over the city’s decision making. Advisory board members who also serve on powerful local political endorsement groups, as is often the case, may further distort the appropriate lines between elected representative and unelected activist.
There are some ways around this problem. Some local governments have begun to provide childcare, compensation and transportation for service on the board lowers the barriers to entry for younger, lower income and single parents interested in serving. Lottery systems for selecting new members can further help prevent the entrenchment of local power players and advocacy groups. But even these solutions don’t address one of the larger issues with the advisory board structure: how they distort the nature of local democracies.
After all, voters choose their local mayor and town/city council members specifically to represent the voters and make decisions on their behalf. Council members who default to the suggestions of an unelected, volunteer advisory board abdicate real representation of their community. Counterintuitively, rather than democratizing local politics, the advisory board system can instead serve to undermine it by giving power to unaccountable volunteers, thus setting up yet another barrier between the people and elected officials.
A foundational principle of democracy is that political decisions should be made by elected representatives. While the dizzying array of local advisory boards may serve valuable purposes, their function is properly understood as advisory – but not representative. Making elected officials more responsive to the public is always a good thing. But elections are the best mechanism for responsiveness – not whoever will show up at 7:30 PM on a weeknight for a three-hour meeting downtown.
