City of Prior Lake turns to social media, new committee to engage residents

Prior Lake American

When it comes to residents who communicate with the city, there are generally a few regulars.

The city of Prior Lake is hoping to switch that up.

In recent years, the city has ramped up efforts to both retain the regular voices as well as hear from the wide variety of voices a city the size of Prior Lake has.

Engagement

The city of Prior Lake used to have advisory committees — which are committees made up of volunteers that make recommendations to staff or the Prior Lake City Council on issues — dealing with the lakes, parks, technology and more.

“As time went by, the committees were realizing that they just weren’t getting enough people to join as term limits ended,” Citizen Engagement Committee member William Kallberg said.

Those committees had experienced a decline in residents wanting to volunteer for seats. In 2017, they were merged into one committee with an additional goal of communication — the Citizen Engagement Committee.

“We are working with City Council and city employees to make sure we are ... a voice for the community and our neighborhood and the different people that lives here,” Citizen Engagement Committee member Jessica Weber said. “The city wants to make sure that residents feel like their voices are being heard. It makes the community stronger.”

The committee, which currently has eight members, took on the work of the old committees as well as coming up with new ways to engage residents in city government.

“We’re just early in the formative stages of trying to develop really good programs,” Kallberg said. “We need to know, what do the people want, what do they support and will you come out physically and help support it?”

Though many of the ideas focus on technology and moving more and more of the communication online, there are a few ideas dealing with in-person communication as well. For instance, members of the Citizen Engagement Committee will hand out cards with city information during neighborhood park parties.

“We are in the process right now of going to neighborhood park parties,” Weber said. “We’re just going to be at the party and handing out little cards to let people know how they can join the newsletter, how to find us on Facebook — valuable information for people to have access to for information, like when the roads are going to be closed.

Citizen Engagement Committee member Kimberly Churchill said one of the goals of the committee is to stop the spread of misinformation.

“There’s not a lot of investigation into what is actually happening and (residents) don’t know, so they rely on opinions — which may or may not be based in facts,” Churchill said.

The ideas of how to engage residents are now flowing, though the first year started a bit slow, Kallberg said.

“We’ve only been in business for about a year, so there were bylaws to be developed and really trying to decide what specific things we could do to involve the citizenry of Prior Lake,” Kallberg said. “It’s been a slow process of figuring that out.”

Virtual town halls

One of the ideas the committee recently came up with was the virtual town hall.

Prior Lake Mayor Kirt Briggs said at his physical town halls, he saw about 20 attendees, most of them regulars.

“Which is great, we’ve got this core group that’s thoroughly engaged,” Briggs said. “But by the same token, we’re not extending our reach. What can we do?”

The idea of a virtual town hall was that busy residents, especially those with full-time jobs or children, could watch a video and fill out a survey on their own time while still getting the same information from the city.

“There was a desire to reach that young family that has made Prior Lake a home but they don’t have time to come to the city council meetings,” Briggs said. “In government, what I learned was we had the voice showing up, but was it the whole voice? To me, it was we need to assemble the choir. We need the broader voice. To get that voice, you have to be proactive.”

City staff did five videos in May, which included Briggs talking to multiple business owners, a developer and a doctor — all people who were involved with business in Prior Lake. Residents were then encouraged to fill out a survey about what businesses were missing in Prior Lake and what the city could do to attract those types of business.

Briggs and Community Development Director Casey McCabe shot a final virtual town hall in front of the future location of PLate on Main, a planned restaurant in downtown Prior Lake, and went over the results of the survey, which had more than 250 responses.

“By any measure, it was a tenfold increase in engagement,” Briggs said.

Briggs said he is cautious about the town hall numbers as the goal is to get a variety of voices from every single demographic.

“You’ve got to diversify your inputs and your outputs to the extent that you get appropriate representation or appropriate voice,” Briggs said. “While the numbers of the town hall would suggest we’re on the right path, we can’t get blinded by simply the numbers. Did we get an awesome response, but just from a different wedge?”

Another effort is to engage more diversity in age, including by allowing high schoolers to sit on various committees and boards to offer a younger input.

“Pretty soon, (the age range) will start with a teenager and go up to an old person like me,” Citizen Engagement Committee member Marcia Diers said. “You get a great perspective that way.”

The city bylaws were recently changed to allow high school-age students to sit on committees.

“That’s student voice,” Briggs said. “From my time as mayor, I had not seen that voice come into our council chambers.”

Social media

Part of engaging the younger voice is learning how to effectively use various forms of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, NextDoor and more.

“Right now, we’ve got a high school student who is assisting us in how Twitter can and should be used to engage the high schoolers,” Briggs said. “It’s clear the high school community relies on Twitter as their social media platform.”

Briggs said he’s tried to be more active on Facebook lately, including the group “Concerned Citizens of Prior Lake,” by commenting and posting about city issues.

“In a social media world, I’m doing as much as I can to be attentive across those ... platforms and to insert myself into controversial comment strings,” Briggs said. “I want to let the broader community know that we’re listening.”

One of those controversial comment strings was on one of Briggs’ own post about murals he had seen in South St. Paul during a tour with the city’s mayor. He asked if residents would be open to the idea of a mural in Prior Lake and the reception was certainly mixed.

“(The murals) were a way for that community to present daily its identity to the past, such that those that weren’t there to experience it at least understood the context,” Briggs said. “The spirit of my intent was purely to start a conversation, to be the catalyst for conversation and don’t take a side — although it was assumed, since I posted it, that I’m pro-mural.”

Briggs said he’s also used social media to show a bit more of his personal life in an effort to be able to connect with residents later on on shared topics. For instance, the process of him building a boat.

“The intent is to reach broader,” Briggs said. “In doing so, notice you’re going to have your critics.”

Though the work on communicating with more residents is certainly underway, there’s more to be done, Briggs said.

“I worked for a guy, his favorite adage was, ‘never arrive,’” Briggs said. “While you may be comfortable with where you are currently, never arrive. ... On communication, I think it’s constantly asking the question, ‘how can we be better?’”