You Have Two Minutes. Use Them Wisely.

What public outreach meetings reveal about who gets heard

Last week, I participated in one of the most time-honored rituals of American advocacy: the public outreach meeting.

For the uninitiated, let me set the scene: It’s 6:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. Inside the gym of Woodrow Wilson School #10 in Bayonne, the NJ Turnpike Authority has arranged a series of foam-core renderings showing where, how, and when they plan to widen and rebuild a congested stretch of highway. Engineers on stage deliver a powerpoint presentation explaining technical specs to a large audience shifting uncomfortably in folding chairs.

It was the final public hearing for this segment of the project. It was also, in theory, the last opportunity for public input.

The room was packed. About 75 union workers turned out to voice support, cheering as their leaders and allied elected officials championed the project for the good paying union jobs it will create. On the other side were about 20 community members and advocates armed with asthma statistics, facts about how widenings worsen traffic, and a palpable frustration with the seeming futility of the process itself.

At one point, in a moment of surreal irony, small pieces of the actual ceiling fell on a few attendees. It went mostly unnoticed, but to me, it was the most honest moment of the night because that's when it hit me: not the ceiling, but the idea that this whole pageantry of sign-in sheets and slide decks and folding chairs is standard operating procedure for agencies and governments across the country seeking public opinion.

Engagement as Afterthought

The state is spending $11B on a road widening project that its own documents say will increase traffic by 32%; a major financial outlay with a major impact on traffic and air quality. But the community wasn’t meaningfully consulted until after the solution was chosen and designs largely complete, after labor and business were promised work, and after budgets were set and elected officials promised traffic relief.

Finally, this is where the public gets the chance to weigh in—standing in an elementary school gym with some loose-leaf notes and a large red timer counting down the two-minutes allocated for each speaker to say their piece.

It’s hard to even blame the Turnpike Authority. This scene is not unique to New Jersey let alone the agency. In many ways, our government is fundamentally not structured to metabolize real public input.

This was a meeting that demonstrated the act of listening. There were microphones and sign-in sheets and ASL interpreters and large renderings of the project, but there was no meaningful exchange. There was no deliberation and certainly no functional intake. Officials are listening but not truly hearing. The state had already made its concessions to the community such as changes to on-ramp placement and a few other adjustments that didn’t really address the main concerns.

The Architecture of Exclusion

To their credit, the Turnpike Authority held more sessions than it may seem. By their own accounting, they’ve hosted around 100 community and stakeholder meetings since 2021. They also held several Public Information Sessions—open house-style sessions in Newark, Bayonne, Jersey City, and online—throughout 2024. They produced multilingual fact sheets and emphasized “ongoing public outreach," despite already having entered final design.

This will always be the result of legally mandated but functionally ineffective community engagement. Here’s an oversimplification of the process for most transportation projects:

Problem emerges → Agency identifies solution → Scope defined → Long-range capital plan → Preliminary Design → Short-term capital plan → Public outreach (to explain or tweak, not reimagine) → Final design + permitting → Construction

There’s very little space in that process for the public to shape the project in any substantive way. The door for feedback may be open, but there’s no hallway behind it. There’s no real path to influence.

If agencies designed with the community, not for them, the process might look more like this:

Problem emerges → Broad scoping of potential responses → Early engagement with local stakeholders → Joint exploration of interventions (expansion? mitigation? mode shift?) → Capital planning shaped by input and evidence → Design firm iterates based on direction → Secondary engagement → Final design → Permitting → Construction.

To be clear: this type of process in no way means that everyone will be happy with every outcome. And this kind of deeply iterative process also may not be necessary—or even productive—for every type of project, like clean energy infrastructure or new housing that conforms to the existing zoning or master plan. But for major transportation projects which often reshape neighborhoods, it’s essential. Our one-size-fits all engagement process is part of what’s failing us.

Who Gets Heard?

This is the hidden truth of many modern public processes: instead of perceiving reality, they perceive volume, force, or proximity to power. The louder you are, the more “real” your input becomes. The more people you bring, the more “valid” your concern appears. The more political clout you wield, the more “feasible” your demands sound. It turns our most important feedback mechanisms into contests for attention that greatly favor resources.

In his seminal work, Seeing Like a State, political scientist James C. Scott explains that laws and regulation are a common way that governments standardize the complexities of real life into administrative standards in order to “see” them, so that they can be measured and controlled. In this light, it’s clear that where the public is placed in the project development process is critical to whether the state can perceive and act on their input.

Designing With, Not For

In addition to engaging meaningfully with the public early and often, governments need a way to assign weight to feedback. Governments generally treat comment periods like competitive arenas, privileging the loudest, most resourced, and most organized voices. Political power often outweighs burden of impact.

Instead, governments should treat public comment more like grantmaking: not all input is equal. Early-phase evaluations should weight the voices of directly affected communities more heavily, recognizing that relevance, not volume, is what ensures good-faith critique and compromise.

Investing in meaningful engagement early is not only beneficial to the community, it also serves as a protective measure for agencies. Upfront dialogue helps surface friction before it hardens into opposition, gives agencies a chance to address concerns before they require costly design changes, and reduces the risk of delays, lawsuits, or eleventh-hour blowups. The extra effort early on often results in smoother implementation, fewer surprises, and, frankly, better projects.

It’s time to talk about what better public process actually looks like. Because until engagement is built into design—not tacked on at the end—we’ll keep spending our Wednesday nights reading timed testimony in crumbling gymnasiums and calling it democracy.