A new external research project will look at two of Fayetteville’s public, volunteer-run advisory boards to explore potential positive intervention strategies and enhance public engagement in the meetings.
The city’s Community Police Advisory Board and Fayetteville Next Advisory Commission are being studied through the Better Public Meetings initiative of the National Civic League, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on advancing civic engagement. The National Civic League also awarded Fayetteville the All-American City award this year, though the study is unrelated to the award.
Jodi Phelps, the city’s chief of staff, first announced the news at the latest police advisory board meeting on Nov. 15.
“We will be conducting some research here in Fayetteville with community members, with some of the board members, with a variety of people to help identify what we can do as a city, what this body can do to engage more residents and really get out there and create buzz about what we do,” Phelps said.
Fayetteville Marketing and Communications Director Loren Bymer referred CityView’s request for more information on the study to Nick Vlahos, the deputy director at the National Civic League’s Center for Democracy Innovation, who’s overseeing the research project. Vlahos said the goal of the pilot program is to revitalize public and community engagement in local government meetings, which have often followed the same format for decades.
“But these meetings remain really a vestige of decades past where you go up to a mic, it's super cathartic and it's contentious,” Vlahos said. “People leave, on both sides, both as officials and as the public, really disaffected and apathetic towards this process. And so our goal really is to do community-engaged research that's both qualitative and quantitative, to get to know and learn communities and provide potential interventions.”
The study is at no cost to the city, and is being funded by the American Arbitration Association - International Centre for Dispute Resolution Foundation, a nonprofit that funds projects promoting conflict resolution and prevention in national and international communities.
Vlahos said Fayetteville is one of three communities nationwide that the National Civic League has chosen to pilot the Better Public Meetings program. The other studies are being conducted with the city council in Boulder, Colorado, and the school board in Mesa, Arizona. Vlahos said the organization intentionally chose local government entities with separate and unique functions in each city, so as to achieve a well-rounded understanding of how to boost civic engagement.
Community Police Advisory Board
The Community Police Advisory Board was established by the city in August 2021 with the purpose of reviewing and recommending methods of improving the Fayetteville Police Department’s practices and policies, though its specific role and function have been subject to criticism since its inception. Activists and city council members have argued the board has not done enough to hold police accountable for use-of-force incidents and instances of police brutality.
At the latest police advisory board meeting, Chair Gregory Perkins expressed a desire to expand the board’s reach beyond police activities to encompass other public safety focuses like the Fayetteville Fire department’s operations and the city’s public safety response to mental health crises.
“Some things for us to be looking down the road at, we need to really consider now that the Office of Community Safety looks like it's going to be a reality we can look at and be thinking about what this board should look like,” Perkins said. “Our primary focus is just on police, and community safety in general, but do we really want the flavor changed up a little bit to shift that focus from just police to just community safety — which is more than just police.”
Along these lines, Perkins said he has already had “informal discussions” with city council members about changing the board’s charter and hopes the board will continue reviewing its scope going into 2024.
Perkins himself has been criticized by Councilmember Mario Benavente and former Councilmember Shakeyla Ingram for not connecting the board’s establishment to calls from local activists to create a police review board after the events of May 2020, when a Minneapolis police officer killed Fayetteville native George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in police custody.
Vlahos said one of the reasons the city and civic league decided to study the police advisory board was the board’s “retention issues.”
More details
The other board being studied is the Fayetteville Next Advisory Commission, which was “established to attract, retain and engage Fayetteville residents between the ages of 19 and 39,” according to its charter. Vlahos did not specify why that specific commission was chosen among the city’s 26 boards and commissions, but noted the decision to choose the boards was a collaborative effort with city staff based on conversations about which of them are “facing perhaps potential challenges, or some that could use assistance.”
Vlahos said the research project involves a multi-step project, including initial conversations with various stakeholders, a public rating process for meetinggoers and a “civic infrastructure scan” that will shed light on particular challenges the groups may have with effective civic engagement. Ultimately, he said, the National Civic League will produce a 10-page report with its findings and provide recommendations on potential improvements to the boards.
Vlahos said the recommendations, which he hopes to present to the Fayetteville community by March, will “suggest ways to innovate how meetings operate, perhaps how public comment and call to the public operates, perhaps ways to use digital tools, perhaps ways to use outreach and mechanisms or spaces in the community that draw in a diverse set of people within the community.”
Overall, Vlahos stressed that the National Civic League is “not a consultancy” group with a profiteering mindset, but rather a nonprofit with a focus on positively impacting the communities it works with for the greater good.
“We are a long-standing civic organization with a big reputation that's national,” Vlahos said. “And our Center for Democracy Innovation is focused on enhancing, scaling and measuring innovations for civic engagement, and utilizing participatory and digital ways to … make their [communities’] experience more authentic, more inclusive and, hopefully, collaborative, especially between each other and in their relationships with their elected officials and board members.”
Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608.
