The room was never the problem

Our council chambers is a converted 1911 bank lobby with a plaster ceiling twenty two feet up and marble on three walls. It is a beautiful room and it is an acoustic disaster. We have four ceiling speakers installed in 1988 by somebody who has since passed away and left no documentation.

What that means in practice is that if you are past about row five you hear a wash. You can tell somebody is talking. You cannot tell what about. And so the shape of every meeting for as long as I have had this job is: the first five rows are the regulars who know the agenda anyway, and the back of the room is people who came about one specific thing, cant follow the two hours before their thing, and leave.

I used to think the answer was a sound system, and I put it in the capital request four years running and it lost four years running to a plow truck and a lift station and a roof, correctly, because those things are more important than my ceiling.

We run the audio to phones now. Its a lapel mic on the mayor, a mic on the podium, and the channel. People sit in the back with one earbud in. The room is still a bad room. The room is exactly as bad as it was. But nobody is trying to hear the room anymore, so it stopped mattering, which is a thing I had not concieved of as an option.

Two things I did not expect. Public comment doubled and it changed character — less shouting, because people were not straining, and more people referencing something a council member had actually said forty minutes earlier, which they had never been able to do before. And the downtown business association started listening in from the shops on meeting nights, because a shopkeeper can have it in one ear and still ring somebody up. Our business association attendance at council went from two people who could close early to about a dozen who dont have to. They have gotten organized enough to actually win a couple of things, which the merchants are happy about and which I will diplomatically say has been an adjustment for some of us.

And we have a handful of Somali families here now, six or seven years, and one of the fathers has started coming to the sidewalk and streets committee. He listens in Somali. He has never once asked for an interpreter because he doesnt need to ask anybody for anything. I dont know how to describe how much easier that is than the alternative we never actually managed to provide.