A couple of seemingly minor tweaks to procedure are now under consideration by the Denver City Council and could pass quietly into law with little more than council’s rubber stamp. That would be a mistake. Take a closer look at the proposals, and you’ll detect another attempt to dig an even wider moat between City Hall and the public.

As reported this week by The Gazette, some council members want to reinvent the city’s long-standing Board of Adjustment. It’s the appointed panel of everyday Denver residents who review their fellow citizens’ appeals of city zoning rules. The board members are there to provide a check and balance on City Hall’s siloed and sometimes smug zoning “experts.” The board at its best can offer the public a workaround on an increasingly complex zoning code.

A couple of City Council members are now proposing to replace the board’s everyday citizens with – surprise! – siloed and smug zoning experts. Presumably, they will be more likely to mirror the priorities of the city’s own zoning staff than the grievances of Denverites filing appeals for the board’s review.

Indeed, one of the board’s principal powers is it can reverse the rulings of the city’s zoning administrator. Evidently, that power no longer can be entrusted to mere commoners. So, council members Amanda Sandoval and Robin Kniech want appointees to the five-person board to have expertise in architecture, law, urban planning, construction, engineering or development. And after they’re appointed, members would have to be trained in the zoning code, legal procedures, adopted plans and let’s not forget diversity, equity and inclusion.

There currently are no requirements for board member qualifications or training, and it couldn’t hurt to give them regular tutorials on the code itself. But it is the fact that Board of Adjustment members are not insiders – and represent every walk of life in the real world – that lends them the perspective of the public that actually has to live with the zoning code. That’s a good thing.

“Because the codes are so large and complex now, (other cities are) having these decisions made more by professionals,” Kniech said. And that’s a bad thing.

Meanwhile, as The Gazette also reported this week, the council is considering changing the sign-up procedure for its weekly public comment session to prioritize people who haven’t spoken at previous meetings. It sounds fair enough at first blush and comes across as a small matter in any event. And nobody is crazy about the crank who regularly pillories the council on issue after issue, meeting after meeting.

But you can’t help wonder if council members who support the proposal aren’t just trying to sidestep ticklish issues and awkward questions – and to mute the members of the public who can be counted on to bring them up.

The big picture here is one of at least some council members who simply would rather not deal with public input. This is, after all, the same council that rammed through a sweeping rewrite of the zoning code last year to allow for “group living” – despite little support at the time and plenty of heated opposition.

Those council members seem to forget their Job No. 1 isn’t to advance bold new visions or even to run the city government. That’s the mayor’s bailiwick.

The council’s job is to listen to the people who elected them. However much it may bore them.

Denver Gazette editorial board