Following are Peachtree City Council actions March 16:
• Voted 3-to-2 to postpone for one month any change to the current ordinance allowing any citizen to add an item to a council meeting agenda.
• Voted 5-O to approve a $64,000 yearly contract with Zencity to provide periodic reports to the city manager about what people are saying about Peachtree City government on social media like FaceBook, Twitter and others.
• Approved design of cross-highway signage just south of the Ga. highways 54-74 intersection. Vote was 4 to 1, with Councilman Clint Holland voting against approval, with no explanation.
• Approved $285,000 bid to install pedestrian beacon (stop and go) on North Peachtree Parkway at the Kedron boat docks.
• Approved continuation of sign-on bonus for new city employees through August 2023.
• Heard consultants’ presentation of plan to re-write city codes to remove conflicting ordinances.
• Received public comment input from a tag-team of citizens calling on the city to consider running its own city elections with paper ballots and ditching the county election board’s participation and rented computer voting machines.
• Applauded with citizens present the American Legion Post 50 awards to Peachtree City Police Officer Zachary Pye as Law Enforcement Officer of the Year and Edward Russman as Firefighter of the Year.
• During Council-Staff topics, Councilman Frank Destadio suggested increasing public comment time limits to three minutes per citizen and a flexible 30-minute time limit on combined public comments. Council was in agreement with the change.
• In non-voting items, Councilman Destadio proposed changing ordinance adoption to a two-part first and second reading. No action was taken.
I too question the need for the media consultant expense, this $64,000.
Why in the world would we need to spend $64,000 per year just to find out what is being said about our city government on social media?
We don’t. Platforms like Zencity are about driving narratives and manipulating perceptions.
Where currently the same small (but likely representative) group of actively engaged citizens are consistently petitioning government, ZenCity’s engagement tools allow the city manager to locate non-involved citizens and target them with messaging and push polling, driving the larger narrative in alignment to their preferred direction. Their Crisis Management tools allow government to target those people and areas which are actively opposed to city policies, including “deploying resources”. Simply put, this $65k investment means that the bureaucrats who run the mechanisms of city government can locate troublemakers on social media, and then send, say, code enforcement to their door to remind them who is in charge.
If you want to understand this better, read Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”.