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Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee September 11, 2008 Page 3 support for a Community Center, the Council is certainly free to explore any options available and in the past would have had a very strong supporter in Tom Kough. Should the Council decide to pursue a Community Center option in the future, the Council could simply approve it or chose to have a referendum on the acquisition-neither of which would be in any way impacted by any previous plans regarding the City Center Master Plan. Finally, and most importantly, is the issue of implementation. Nowhere are there concrete plans or a defined process for public input in the planning stages for any development proposals within the city. In the past couple of years we have observed the "Stakeholders' Panel," the "Lot Split Committee," and now the "Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee." It is without any criticism of any residents serving on these committees that I say the entire process is flawed and in no way provides genuine citizen participation or input. In each of these cases, resident members were appointed by the City Council, often by the same 3/2 split that has become the City Council's preferred method of operation in the past several years. In each case, the "appointed" residents were outnumbered by the aggregate of consultants (hired by the Council), staff (serving at the pleasure of the City Manager hired by the Council), "appointed resident members of other city Commissions and /or developers anxious be make a profit in Roseville. It is not "leadership" to stack the deck. It is "leadership" to be confident enough to allow residents a genuine opportunity to engage in discussion, elect chairs of their groups and committees, and vote on important issues. It is also entirely likely that resident groups are perfectly capable of studying issues and drafting reports which could then by worked on jointly with staff until astaff- resident consensus could be reached and presented to the Council. At such a point the Council could hold public hearings and move forward with a document before them that actually represented, at least in part, the wishes of residents and had been reviewed and confirmed by staff as workable and appropriate. "Open Houses" are not a substitute for resident input and work on a specific issue. Lectures are not a substitute for writing a research paper. In the past few years, perhaps since the Vista 2000, Roseville government has maintained only tacit acknowledgement of the wishes or abilities of its residents. This is evidenced by the hundreds of residents that actively participated in Vista 2000 versus the under 100 that actively participated in Imagine Roseville 2025. In the case of the "Stakeholders Panel" and the "Lot Split Committee" residents were asked for their input and opinions on various issues, yet when the final reports were issued those opinions were completely ignored. In the case of this Steering .Committee, the residents I spoke to at the first open house were generally