I was interested to read this paper’s account of the City Council’s recent hearing on their emergency inn moratorium (Inns in Trouble on BI, Steven Powell, 1/26/23,) which I attended as a representative of the project targeted by that ordinance.

While I was disappointed by the council’s disinclination to reconsider their moratorium, I came away from the experience more dismayed by the structure and conduct of the hearing itself, and that the precipitous passage of the law left such a flawed and regressive forum as the only recourse available to us.

The moratorium was passed on an “emergency” basis, which obliged the council to hold a public hearing within 60 days, ostensibly to obtain public input. To that end, 20 minutes were inserted into a packed agenda during which members of the public had a single opportunity of no more than three minutes to unburden themselves before the council.

No provision was made to field questions from councilmembers, to rebut mistaken assertions or material omissions, or even to correct misinformation, which was inevitably rife: false, inflammatory, and even potentially defamatory statements went unchallenged by city staff and the council, who had the relevant facts before them and were unbound by the speaking limits that throttled the rest of us.

Thus the hearing’s structure was inimical to its ostensible purpose. No deliberative body seeking to obtain good input from the public would conduct a public hearing in that way, and I don’t think it would be unreasonable for the public to derive some conclusions about the real nature and purpose of these hearings from consideration of that fact.

If the council is disinclined to counter misinformation on matters of public controversy during its hearings, then it should establish a procedure by that participants might be able to do so. A scheduled public hearing does not have the same function as the unstructured public comment sections that open every meeting, and the fact that these hearings are arbitrarily conducted according to the same rules of order is revealing.

I don’t pretend to have been a disinterested party in this controversy, and I will own my disappointment as to the hearing’s outcome: it is a bitter pill to have a project summarily killed on the eve of its approval after a 10-month planning process with the city. But I’m certain that this outcome would sting less keenly if a proper forum had been available for us to plead our case on the merits.

I would strongly urge the council to reconsider the structure and conduct of these hearings to better support their true function and purpose, which is to furnish the council with good input from the public on issues before them, unpolluted by falsehood and misinformation.

Joe Raymond is the general manager at Pleasant Beach Village.