“Photo:The Langley City Council has tried a number of tactics over the years to get more public participation. Although wearing cowboy hats to meetings is not one of them, city attorney Eric Lucas, Mayor Lloyd Furman, clerk-treasurer Debbie Mahler, and council member Dione Murray might consider it.Matt Johnson / staff photoThree weeks after a capacity crowd filled the Langley City Council chamber to hear the outcome of a hotel-motel sales tax vote, the chamber was empty at last Wednesday’s regular council meeting, save for the council members and one newspaper reporter.During the past year, Fire Protection District 3 commissioners heard not so much as a word from the public at their regular meetings about the impending construction of a new Saratoga fire station. The district had to hold a special meeting to explain the scope of the project to nearby residents. Afterward, even though a number of people called or wrote the district with comments or complaints, no one from the Saratoga Road neighborhood attended a single commissioners meeting.The South Whidbey Port District Commissions can count on one hand the members of the public who have attended their meetings in the past year. So can the Island Transit commissioners. The South Whidbey Parks commissioners usually see a few more people, but typically only when sports associations need more field space.How to get members of the voting public to these meetings is a question no elected body has been able to answer in recent years. It has come down to a question of time, said Langley City Council member Neil Colburn. Today’s two-wage-earner families simply cannot carve the time out of their schedules to attend the dinnertime meetings most local taxing entities hold. Typically, unless there is a major taxing or planning issue on the city council’s agenda, the council chamber can be quite empty.“It really is issue driven,” Colburn said.Port commissioner Gene Sears said he and his fellow commissioners are lucky to see a member of the public at their meetings once in a blue moon. Although the Port collects several hundred thousand dollars in tax money every year, it does not get much public guidance on how those funds should be used. The biggest challenge to good public attendance, or any attendance at all, is in letting the public know what is on any particular meeting agenda.“The average guy or gal won’t go to something unless they know what’s going on,” Sears said.That is why the Port and many other municipalities rely on the media to notify the public. Most of the time, locals stay informed about what their elected officials are doing by reading newspapers. Sears said the Port relies on news stories almost entirely to spread word of what the commissioners are purchasing with public money.Though this reliance on the media is beneficial to elected bodies and voters, it is a double-edged sword at times. A news story is only a report, and if the report is about something the public does not like, Neil Colburn said he and his elected colleagues hear about it in letters to the editor, but not necessarily in the meeting room.“I think the paper is more of a public forum,” he said. Some members of the public do prefer to have their say at the meetings, however. Linda Cotton is one of the more regular attendees at parks district meetings. A member of the South Whidbey Youth Soccer Association, Cotton said she does not make every meeting. Like many other people, she attends when issues on the agenda affect her organization directly. However, she said, if she knew more about what is happening at every meeting, she and other members of the public might show up more often. How could that happen?“More education about what’s going on,” Cotton said.Or, even a nice invitation to meetings might help, because being the one of just a few public voices in a nearly empty room can be intimidating, she said.That invitation is there, said parks commissioner Curt Gordon, even though it is not expressly stated on a regular basis. He said he wishes more people would take the commissioners up on it. Having even five voting parks district residents at a meeting can make a big difference in the decisions the commissioners make, Gordon said, because a block of citizens act much like a checks and balance for the board and parks director.“It’s always nice to have a finger on the pulse of public opinion,” Gordon said.Gordon, Colburn and Sears agree having the public at meetings to act as a “watchdog” of sorts is as good for the voters as it is for elected officials. But none of them are able to say how to get their constituents to meetings on a regular basis. About eight years ago, the Langley City Council tried holding a “coffee hour” before meetings, supplying coffee and cookies to anyone who showed up. That worked for a while, Colburn said, until the weather turned rainy and cold during the winter. The best any elected body can do, Colburn said, is to keep meeting issues relevant. While not every meeting will address a major tax issue — which seem to be the biggest public draw these days — all issues, if discussed completely, should provoke public interest.”