Reader: BPOL event poorly managed

There has been a lot of rhetoric on BPOL with views on both sides of the issue. What has been written, especially in the Letters to the Editor section of the Free Lance-Star, has expressed views for or against the BPOL tax or criticizing or supporting the supervisors who voted for or against it. But what seems to have been lost in the debate is a much greater issue of the disgraceful manner in which the public hearing process continues to be conducted.

Any reasonable person would consider a "public hearing" to be the opportunity for the public to express their views before elected officials and listen to the discussion by the staff and elected officials on the issue on which the elected officials will reach a decision. Although the BPOL so-called public hearing may have begun properly, allowing it to go until after 3:00 a.m. no longer qualifies it as a public hearing. Holding a public hearing during hours that the public cannot attend disqualifies it as an opportunity for the public to express their views. If this is the only opportunity for the public to express their views before the elected officials vote for or against a law or regulation that will affect the public, then the public should have a reasonable opportunity to express their views.

Holding a public hearing after even 11:00 p.m. disqualifies many of the public from speaking. Obviously, many people have to work the next day (some have to leave for work between 5 and 7 a.m.), many senior citizens can't or no longer feel capable of driving late at night and single women shouldn't be forced to wait until 3 a.m. to return home. Did they have to stay after they spoke assuming they spoke early in the hearing? The answer is a resounding "yes" because they came to express their views, hear the discussion and learn the outcome on an issue of so great importance to them that they came to the hearing. But if they didn't get a chance to speak until almost midnight or 1 a.m., they were forced to stay until they were heard…after all, that is why they came! And let us not forget all the people, and there were many, who left without speaking because they no longer could stay and were denied the opportunity to express their views.

It was clear from the beginning of the hearing that well over 100 people had signed up to speak. A very large number of people who came to attend the hearing were forced to go to upstairs meeting rooms or stand in the lobby or outside the building. Whoever had the authority to move the hearing to a location where all interested parties could be part of the proceedings, refused to change it.

There is ample precedent for finding a better hearing room when the crowd and number of speakers are anticipated to far exceed the capacity of the board chamber. Whoever had the authority to determine if more than one night was necessary to allow a proper hearing knew that the rules allow each speaker four minutes to express their view. That adds up to a minimum of 400 minutes or almost seven hours just for the public presentations.

Added to this is the time for staff to make their presentation, time for supervisors to ask questions of the staff and supervisors' discussion time before they vote. Simple mathematics demonstrates that a minimum of eight hours would be require everyone to stay until 3 a.m. or later. There is no reason the board could not have recessed the hearing and continued it on one or more nights. There is precedent for that and it would have been the right thing to do. The board chose to continue an almost pointless marathon session, pointless because the majority four of the seven supervisors already had said how they were going to vote.
It was a "done deal" before the hearing began.

Why hold a public hearing until after 3 a.m. where the vast majority of the public speaks against the ordinance and then the "majority" of the supervisors disregards the" majority" views of the public? Did they not hear anything that might alter their view? Were these views of no value especially since the staff did not present any substantive data to support or oppose the passage of a BPOL tax? How did the supervisors justify their votes without any data? This is not the first time they passed an ordinance without supporting data or with data that is shamefully statistically unusable.

Another major shameful failure that also has gotten lost in the BPOL debate is that the BPOL ordinance was not the only ordinance on the agenda. Sometime after 3 a.m. the board passed three more critical ordinances denying the public the opportunity to voice their opinion on these important issues. How can the chairman allow ordinances to be passed in the middle of the night? Discussion on these ordinances had not started and they could have been deferred. It is unconscionable to conduct public business in the dark of night.

Whether you are for or against BPOL is not the important issue. Whether you are for or against "bad government" is the issue. And if the citizens of Stafford
County allow this to continue that is what they will get and shame on them.

There is an old political saying that two things you don't want to see are the making of sausage and the making of laws. The Stafford Board of Supervisors, or at least four of them, give new meaning to that saying.