Who Gets Heard At City Hall?

Steve Pair, a local journalist and author of Main Point Monday, recently published a follow-up commentary about the growing public discussion surrounding a potential forensic audit of the City of Amarillo.

Several events have contributed to calls for greater financial scrutiny, including:

• Three former City employees pleading guilty to crimes involving the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars through a City housing program. The activity was not uncovered through ordinary audits or normal supervisory controls. It came to light after a whistleblower stepped forward.
• Approximately $30 million in previously unspent bond proceeds being identified by City staff after the funds had remained allocated but unused.
• An additional estimated $43 million tied to capital improvement projects that reportedly remained open and had not been properly closed out.

These are not insignificant amounts of money.

Citizens are asking reasonable questions about how these funds were tracked, why they remained unused or unresolved, and whether the City’s existing financial controls are adequate.

But there is another major category of City spending that has largely escaped public scrutiny for more than a decade.

It is an area we have examined privately and discreetly with City staff and elected officials across two different administrations.

It is also one of the City’s largest recurring annual expenses: its self-funded employee health plan.

Over the next several weeks, I will begin sharing some of the data, analysis and financial opportunities we have presented to the City over the better part of the past decade.

Before doing that, however, I want to respond to Mr. Pair’s commentary.

I read Main Point Monday regularly. I have personally reached out to Mr. Pair to compliment his work. His newsletter is informative, thoughtful and valuable to the community.

I do not always agree with his conclusions, and that is perfectly fine. In fact, disagreement is part of the point of healthy civic discourse.

Over the past few weeks, Mr. Pair has written about the tone of public discussion in Amarillo. In his latest commentary, he focuses on the pressure faced by public officials and City employees and the increasingly “noisy” environment in which they operate.

Defending public employees from harassment, abuse and false accusations is entirely fair.

The problem is that the commentary repeatedly blurs several very different things together: harassment, misinformation, criticism, public comment and legitimate civic scrutiny.

They are all treated as variations of “noise.”

That framing matters.

It treats criticism primarily as a communications problem instead of asking whether the criticism itself may be valid.

It centers the emotional burden experienced by officials and staff while giving far less attention to the frustration of citizens who feel ignored, misled or forced to fight for basic information and transparency.

It characterizes active citizens as “the voices of a few” who may be “louder than the community itself,” which risks delegitimizing the very people using council meetings, public comment periods and civic forums for their intended purpose.

And perhaps most importantly, it creates an assumption that City leadership represents the reasonable majority while critics represent negativity.

That is a very convenient perspective for those who hold power.

The most revealing sentence in the commentary is this:

“Complaints naturally dominate social media and public comment periods.”

That description reduces public comment to a venue for grievances instead of recognizing it as one of the few formal opportunities citizens have to question government decisions and demand answers.

People generally do not take time out of their day to appear before the City Council for three minutes because everything is going wonderfully.

They show up because they believe something is wrong, because private communication has failed, or because they do not believe their questions are being taken seriously.

I have experienced this dynamic firsthand.

Even measured and legitimate criticism can quickly result in the critic being branded a “complainer,” a “disgruntled citizen,” a “noise maker,” or someone who is merely upset because a City contract or bid did not go their way.

Once that label is applied, officials no longer have to engage with the substance of the concern.

They can simply dismiss the messenger.

That is precisely why an important distinction is missing from Mr. Pair’s commentary:

Personal attacks and knowingly false accusations should be condemned.

Persistent, evidence-based criticism should not be dismissed as noise.

Those are not the same thing.

In our case, we have not relied on vague accusations or angry social media posts.

For the better part of a decade, we have raised specific questions involving healthcare claims data, vendor contracts, provider reimbursement, utilization patterns, financial incentives and millions of dollars in recurring public spending.

We have presented data.

We have identified specific areas of concern.

We have offered specific recommendations.

We have repeatedly attempted to engage City staff and elected officials privately and professionally.

When that kind of scrutiny is dismissed as “background noise,” it does not answer the questions.

It avoids them.

When public officials describe criticism as noise, they should be asked how they distinguish between misinformation and abuse on one hand, and legitimate public scrutiny on the other.

How do they determine whether a critic is merely being disruptive or whether that person has identified a real financial or operational problem?

How do they ensure that personal frustration with the messenger does not interfere with their responsibility to evaluate the message?

And how many times should a citizen be expected to privately raise the same concern before bringing it into the public square?

Those are the questions I wish Mr. Pair had asked.

Healthy civic discourse does require restraint, fairness and respect.

But it also requires government officials to tolerate discomfort, answer difficult questions and resist the temptation to dismiss persistent critics as merely negative.

Civic engagement is easy to praise when it is agreeable, supportive and convenient.

The real test comes when citizens become informed enough to question contracts, spending decisions, internal controls and long-standing assumptions.

That is not noise.

That is accountability.

And lastly, Mr. Pair’s write-up is not merely describing a difficult communications environment. It is revealing the institutional posture the City has toward critics.

The repeated use of phrases like “noise”, “background noise”, “negativity”, and “the voices of the few” suggests that some City staff and officials may see persistent public criticism less as oversight and more as interference. That matters because once critics are mentally categorized as disruptive, their evidence can be dismissed before its even considered.

Public employees may care deeply about the city and still make poor decisions, resist scrutiny, protect flawed processes, or overlook serious problems. Good intentions do not eliminate the need for accountability.

Again, experienced this first-hand. City officials no longer repond to my emails. Once someone has been placed in the “negative”, “difficult”, or “noise-maker” category, officials no longer feel obligated to engage with the substance. They tell themselves thare are protecting their focus from noisy distraction.

There is a difference between personal attackes and evidence-based criticism. There is a difference between misinformation and uncomfortable facts. And there is a difference between background noise and taxpayers asking specific questions about millions of dollars of public spending.