Public Commission

This follows a discussion at a recent meeting. In Sometown, in the Bay Area, two commission members are at odds about why they’re there. One holds that a commission exists to help the administrative government get its work done. The department has more projects than hours, and a commission can read the plans, hear from residents, catch mistakes and send the work forward with some public standing behind it. The other holds that a commission is empowered to say what the work will be. Call the first the blue commissioner and the second the orange commissioner. Both do the reading, and the argument doesn’t go away, because each of them can point to meetings that went their way.

The word itself runs in both directions. A patron commissions a portrait and thereby decides what will be painted. An officer holds a commission and carries out what someone else has decided. A citizens’ commission could be either one, citizens who commission or citizens who have been commissioned, and the name doesn’t settle which.

Commissions with a clear job

Some commissions leave little doubt. California voters created the Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2008 to draw district lines the legislature had been drawing for itself, and its maps don’t go to legislators for approval. Washington voters amended their constitution in 1986 to have a citizen commission set the pay of state elected officials, and a member from each congressional district is drawn by lot from its registered voters. Charter review commissions propose changes to the terms a city government operates under, which puts the city’s own arrangements in front of people outside them.

In each of these a decision has been lifted out of the hands of whoever has a stake in it. No one supposes Washington’s commission exists to help legislators get their salaries done.

Unclear mandate

A municipal commission rarely has so clean a mandate. A Parks and Recreation Commission is typically an advisory body to a city council, with a list of duties that sounds substantial: long-range plans, capital projects, budget recommendations, program review, hearing residents before a contested item reaches council. The department does the mowing and hires the lifeguards. “Advisory” leaves open almost everything the two commissioners are arguing about.

Party doesn’t help sort it. In a 2026 Trust for Public Land poll, 79 percent of adults called local parks part of their community’s essential infrastructure, including 89 percent of Harris voters and 80 percent of Trump voters. Red and blue towns may justify a new park differently, one citing equity and the other property values, but a commissioner in either kind of town can find themselves in this same argument, and the colors on the two commissioners here are only names, either one can turn up in either kind of town.

What each of them has right

The blue commissioner has the daily experience of the job on their side. Department staff are trained, stretched and accountable for results. A volunteer who meets once a month can’t hire anyone, spend anything or direct a crew. When a commissioner walks a trail before the meeting and notices the plan puts a bench where the hillside floods, a department is spared a mistake, and residents are too.

The orange commissioner has the organization chart. In a council-manager city the department answers to the city manager, and the commission answers to the council that appointed it. A commission isn’t in the department’s chain of command, above it or below it. Even Woodrow Wilson, who wanted a professional administrative class insulated from elections, wrote in 1887 that “administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” which assumed that the ends came from somewhere else. “Help them get their work done” passes over the word their. The parks belong to the town, and the department was hired to look after them.

Neither reading matches the formal rules. The handbook for boards and commissions in another Bay Area Sometown has each one prepare an annual work plan for council approval, and tells them to leave alone anything the council hasn’t approved, whether the time spent would be their own or staff’s. Formally the council says what the work will be. The report that delivered one year’s plans shows how little that formality settles. The planning commission’s draft was, by its own account, developed by its staff liaison and sent to the City Clerk before the commission had reviewed it. In the same document, the parks commission’s plan carries an item to review tennis and pickleball court rules, assigned to two of its members, marked as neither mandated by law nor directed by council. Same city, same year, same form. One commission received its plan and the other had at least partly written its own.

The agenda works the same way. California’s open-meeting law says that “no action or discussion shall be undertaken on any item not appearing on the posted agenda.” A staff liaison who assembles the packet, even in good faith and in consultation with the chair, therefore determines most of what a commission is able to talk about. A commissioner who has only ever been handed the department’s items carries a map of public life drawn to the department’s edges, and may sincerely conclude that nothing lies beyond them.

Who is in control of what

Put plainly, the two commissioners are disagreeing about direction. In one account the line runs from government through the commission to citizens. Staff decide what needs doing, the commission tests it, and the public is brought along. In the other it runs from citizens through the commission and the council to the department. The usual description of a commission as a “bridge” between community and government avoids the question, since a bridge doesn’t say which way the load is moving.

Park infrastructure makes the stakes concrete, because it’s where a town’s associations happen. A youth league exists only if it has a field on a Saturday. The same is true of a cricket club, a dawn tai chi group, a pickleball ladder, a neighborhood’s annual picnic. Whoever controls the permit calendar, the gate hours, the court rules and the fence decides which of those can go on. Control of infrastructure shades into control of citizens without anyone intending it, through a fee schedule, a liability rule or a closure for maintenance.

Other Sometowns have seen what happens when citizens have no hold on that machinery. One commissioned its own hazard reports on an oak, residents paid for a third that disagreed, and the city manager stood on the city’s. In another, work designated as safety could proceed without notice to the parks commission, a citizen body appointed to have a say over that ground. Seen from the blue commissioner’s position, a commission’s role as “sounding board” takes on a colder meaning, a place where a resident’s objection can be heard, recorded and absorbed before it gets near a decision.

The revolutionary generation had a sharper idea of what citizen oversight was for. Pennsylvania’s constitution of 1776 created a Council of Censors, two members elected from each city and county every seven years, charged with asking whether the legislative and executive branches had “performed their duty as Guardians of the People” or had assumed “other or greater Powers” than they were entitled to. It could summon people and records and ask how public money had been spent. It met only once, in 1783 and 1784, and Pennsylvania abolished it in 1790. It’s an odd body to set beside a parks commission, but its starting premise was that government’s duties were owed, and that citizens could be chosen to come and check.

Membership follows the idea

The perception does its most lasting work before anyone sits down at the dais, because it determines who is there. A city that thinks of a commission as help recruits for help. Banning, California, asks applicants for education, work, volunteer and civic experience and uses the form to screen who gets interviewed. Indianola, Iowa, requires a “vital interest in parks and recreation.” These are reasonable rules, and they tend to produce the landscape architect, the retired recreation manager, the league organizer, capable people who understand a staff report and know what a department is up against.

A resident who reads the notice as a chance to volunteer applies in that spirit, and a council looking for a smooth meeting appoints in the same one. A person likely to ask why this project and not another reads the same notice and doesn’t see a place for themselves. The neighbor who has never played on the field but lives with its lights is seldom there, or the renter, or the person who uses the park every day and has no credential to list. Then the commission meets, deals with what it’s given and does it well, and the blue commissioner’s account has become an accurate description of that commission. It’s hard to tell from inside whether the commission was always that kind of body, or whether it was staffed to become one.

The other perception has its own distortion. A commission understood as a seat for constituencies fills with the people who already organized to get something, and a tennis player arguing court policy as a commissioner is still a tennis player. Washington’s drawing by lot answers a different worry, but it does show that nothing about citizen service requires self-selection. A commission with some seats drawn from a town’s voters, or tied to its neighborhoods, would be recruiting from the idea that it holds the town’s stake rather than the department’s expertise, which the department has already.

An institution in Burke’s sense

Edmund Burke told a young Frenchman in 1789 that “the liberty I mean is social freedom,” a liberty “ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.” Another Day With Edmund Burke took up what that asks of us, and it’s easy to hear institutions and think of courts, churches and parliaments. A citizens’ commission is a better test of the idea because it’s so small and so available. It’s a place where a resident learns to read a capital budget, finds out why the pool costs what it costs, loses a vote and comes back next month. Over years of minutes and overlapping terms it can hold what the town learned from the last field renovation, after the manager who ran that project has moved to another city.

An ordinance can create a commission in an evening, but an institution takes longer, and Burke’s adjective matters. A commission can have a charter and a meeting schedule and still secure nothing for anyone, if its members were chosen to be useful and its agenda arrives from elsewhere. When a function like that withers, nothing visibly closes. The meetings continue, and the packet is on time.

Seen from social liberty, then, the orange commissioner has the direction right and the blue has a good description of the working relationship. Staff know how, and what it costs, and which parts the law requires. The commission’s part is what and why, on behalf of people who own the place. In practice that would look modest. Members would write the first draft of their own work plan, with staff supplying costs and mandates. The chair would set the agenda with staff support, in place of signing off on one. The commission would be told before work begins on its parks, including work labeled safety, and would have a small budget for a second opinion so that residents needn’t pay for one themselves. It would still make recommendations to a council, since a council answers to voters and a commission mostly doesn’t. Its power would be the power to put a question on the public record and make someone answer it there.

Stronger forms exist, with their own record. Minneapolis voters approved a Board of Park Commissioners in 1883, and today nine elected commissioners run the park system with authority over their own budget, subject to a levy ceiling and a mayoral veto they can override. Almost all of the city’s waterfront is public. Yet the first commissioners were appointed, with powers of taxation and eminent domain. The St. Paul Globe called them “landed capitalists,” and the Knights of Labor warned the plan would “rob the working classes of their homes.” David C. Smith, a historian of those parks, thinks the class divide has been exaggerated.

And citizens in control is no guarantee of liberty for the citizen on the wrong side of a committee. Article 11 of the Continental Association of 1774 called for a committee in every county, city and town, chosen by local voters, “attentively to observe the conduct of all persons,” with violators published in the gazette and “universally contemned.” Those committees did real work against a real empire, and they also taught neighbors to watch neighbors. A commission that says what work gets done has to do it where people can see, with terms that end and members who can lose, or it becomes one more power over people who use the park.

The disagreement can be tested in the first Sometown. California’s open-meeting law confines a commission to its posted agenda and also lets its members “take action to direct staff to place a matter of business on a future agenda.” A commissioner could make that motion at the next meeting, on something the department hadn’t brought, and the vote would show whose commission it is.

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A note on how this piece was written: the subject, the question of who is in control, and the positions taken here are mine. Much of the research, the examples, and the sentences were drafted by an AI model working from that direction, and then edited by hand. I’d rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.