“Bring Your Own Lunch - Meet with the Mayor”

Last Wednesday Mayor Bruno held the quarterly “Bring Your Own Lunch - Meet with the Mayor.” This is an informal gathering of anyone in Springdale who would like to chat with the Mayor. At this last one, Rick Wixom and Tom Dansie were also there, which was extra helpful. Although it’s always called Bring Your Own Lunch, most people there did not bring food to eat, just food for thought. It was casual and friendly with a half dozen citizens joining. I asked if the Mayor would write an article about her husband, the man behind the mayor, as it were. She asked if it was for this publication and, when finding that was the case, demurred, saying, “I won’t be writing the article. Let’s just leave it at that.”

There were questions and comments about how best to time comments about upcoming town potential undertakings, with no definitive answer, but, basically town council and staff seemed willing to receive comments any time. The biggest take away from the gathering was probably that citizens felt it challenging to get information and town staff and Mayor feeling they were doing a good job of keeping us informed. The comment was made that when people are expert in an area, they often feel they are communicating more effectively than they are since the gatherer of information is probably not as expert as the those disseminating the information. Makes sense, I remember in college realizing that the professors most well known in their fields were often the least effective communicators of their expertise. Those professors simply did not understand how students could not understand the topic.

Turns out, this meeting is a good example of insufficient communication as a very engaged citizen posted how she did not know anything about it until it was too late. It did receive three sentences in January’s town newsletter, but that was the only reference I could find for it from the town. Maybe citizens need to be more careful with the information given by the town and the town could be more abundant with disseminating information.

So a potentially fixable communication problem was brought to light.