When you want to speak out about an issue in your neighborhood, it can be hard to know where to start. One way to get involved in local advocacy is giving your opinion during a public government meeting.
It’s a chance to directly share your concerns with elected officials before they make decisions on policies that affect your everyday life.
How giving public comment works in Indiana
- Not every public meeting sets time aside for neighbors to give in-person comments. Indiana law leaves it up to councils or committees to decide.
- If there is a public comment period, it has to happen before officials make their final decision.
- At City-County Council meetings, you can only comment during the “public hearing” part of the agenda, a city spokesperson said. Council committees typically have a time for public comments, but they aren’t required to do so.
- Governing bodies can limit the time each person has to give public comments and the number of people who can speak.
- Some governing bodies might require you to sign up in advance. Others allow you to show up and write your name on a sign-up sheet. Many offer online public comment forms.
- Public comment rules can vary for different government entities, so visit their websites for more information. Indy Documenters has a handy list of government agencies, their websites, and where and when they meet.
Mirror Indy talked to three neighbors who recently gave public comments in front of local or state officials, asking them what they learned from the experience and what advice they would give to someone speaking up for the first time.
A neighbor who fought Google’s data center and won
In March, Brittany York didn’t know her neighbor down the street, didn’t know about local neighborhood organizations and didn’t know there were local land use and development meetings in her area.
Then, she heard Google was planning to build a massive data center in Franklin Township, where she lives.
York and her neighbors started a community group, Protect Franklin Township, to oppose the data center. They created a website, printed signs and spoke up at public meetings.
In June, York and three neighbors gave their feedback at a rezoning meeting with the Metropolitan Development Commission hearing examiner. To prepare, they met regularly on Zoom. They divvied up the work on their PowerPoint presentation, based on their professional backgrounds and personal interests. They each spoke during the 15-minute presentation at the City-County Building.
In August, they did it all over again to prepare for a Metropolitan Development Commission meeting, but they tweaked the presentation.
This time, only York and Julie Goldsberry, a retired accountant, spoke.
“For the MDC, we decided to focus more on the specifics of zoning,” she said. “They really care about the specifics of statutes and numbers.”
On Sept. 22, York walked into a City-County Council meeting, ready to use the experience she’d gained to speak for a third time. This time, she wanted to focus on how the center could affect residents’ quality of life with higher energy bills or environmental contamination. But Google pulled the data center proposal before she got a chance to talk.
“We were happy, but it was a ‘tentative’ happy,” she said. Google could resubmit the proposal in January in Franklin Township or another area of the city.
If the trillion-dollar company comes back to the fight, York said she would tweak her tactics.
“I would hone in the information we’re presenting for the audience a little more,” she said. “We would probably have less speakers in the first round. I think we lost some of our impact and some of our time when switching out people.”
But, she said, “the overall message isn’t changing,” she said.
A middle school teacher who finds stories in the classroom
The first time Ronak Shah spoke at a public government meeting, he was a student at Indiana University Bloomington, studying cognitive science and conflict resolution.
He was part of Dream IU, a group advocating for the state of Indiana to pass a Dream Act, which would allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at public universities.
Standing in front of the Bloomington City Council in 2010, he used scripted talking points from Dream IU.
“I felt like, in retrospect, I made zero impact. If I had gone up there and just told a single story about how I was impacted by the issue, I would have had more impact than me repeating somebody else’s talking points,” he said.
Now, when he steps up to the microphone, he tells a story.
Shah, 35, is a science teacher at T.C. Howe Middle School. He finds stories in his classroom, and uses the comment period at public meetings to share how policy decisions impact students.
He’s written about 30 opinion columns and given comments at the Indiana Statehouse and at Indianapolis Public Schools board meetings.
Shah, who lives in Irvington, spoke at the Statehouse last year when eastsiders were debating dedicated bus lanes for IndyGo’s Blue Line. The room was packed, and each person who spoke on that topic got about two minutes to speak in front of lawmakers.
Usually, Shah treats giving public comments like improv. He comes to a meeting with his own talking points and sits in the audience, writing out what he wants to say. He listens to what others say, to make sure his speech represents a unique perspective.
He waited about two hours for his two minutes. At the mic, he talked about how buses could make it easier for students to get to new schools that had opened along bus lines and how the Blue Line could help high schoolers get to internships and jobs.
“I felt like I was adding something to the conversation that I didn’t see was there,” Shah said.
A paralegal who combed through documents to help neighbors
In July and August, the city of Beech Grove was trying to decide whether to raise its sewer rates by about $10 a month. In this southside city, everyone pays a $37 flat rate, no matter how much they use.
Jennifer Marks, a 41-year-old paralegal, believes the city should shift to usage-based billing. When she was looking over data to include in her three-minute public comment in front of the Beech Grove Common Council in July, she was thinking about her neighbors down the street.
Marks and her husband have four sons, and they use about 5,000 gallons of water each month. Her neighbors are a retired couple on a fixed income.
“I know they’re not using the same amount of sewage and sewer water that we are,” she said.
Marks and her husband sat at their kitchen table, combing through documents every night for more than a month this summer. She went line-by-line through a household usage study, putting the skills from her paralegal job to use.
On July 31, she spoke during a public hearing at Hornet Park Community Center. It was the first time she’d given public comment at a government meeting. She signed her name on a sheet of paper when she walked in, carrying a list of bulleted facts to share with Beech Grove councilors and an audience of about 20 neighbors.
Marks was nervous at the start, but shook off her nerves pretty quickly.
“I really tried to just bring the facts forward and to help educate not only the city council members, but some of the other citizens that were there as well,” she said.
The councilors approved the $10 hike in sewer rates, but postponed making decisions on raising rates any more. Although her efforts weren’t fully successful, Marks said it wasn’t a waste of time.
“If you don’t get the outcome that you hoped for, that doesn’t mean you weren’t an asset,” she said, “because what you’re doing is creating an open forum for people to have those discussions.”
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Mirror Indy reporter Sophie Young covers services and resources. Contact her at sophie.young@mirrorindy.org.
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