The goal of attending the meeting is to observe and analyze the decision-making process at the local level. When you get to the meeting, be sure to grab an agenda for that meeting that you can follow along with and take notes on. After you attend the meeting, you will write a minimum 3 page essay detailing your thoughts on the event (see grading matrix and question prompts below). • Your essay should NOT be a factual summary of events at the meeting. Rather, you should attempt to assess, evaluate and analyze what you observe. I have attended hundreds of Council meetings, so I don’t need you to give me just a simple play-by-play of what happens at a Council meeting. This should be an analysis not just a run-down of what happened at the meeting. • You should evaluate the process you observe at the meeting and give specific examples as illustration. • You should make a special effort to assess the roles played by council members, administrators (i.e., the city manager and other city staff), and citizens in attendance (audience, speakers, groups–who’s there, how many, for what purpose, etc.?). • These questions to should be answered in your essay (i.e., these questions should become the outline for your essay and all should be answered):
o What is the relationship between the city staff, the citizens, and the city council?
o What role do you see the City Manager/Administrator having in the policymaking process, if any?
o What is the relationship among the city council members themselves?
o Did the Mayor play an important role in the process? What form of local government does your city seem to use (mayor-council? Strong mayor? Weak mayor? Council-manager?)
o What were some leadership qualities that you noted from the City Manager? Mayor?
o How does the city council make decisions? Are decisions made at council meetings after careful deliberation or do they appear to have been made in advance? How and why?
o What types of policy decision were made at the meeting? Can you see the process of issue creation, agenda building, issue resolution, policy implementation, and policy feedback at play?
o Who seems to dominate the process?
o What role did citizens have in the process? Did anyone speak? Were citizens’ concerns heard and considered?
o Is this democracy at work?
o What did you think was interesting? What was different than expected?
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