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Council critiques Mentimeter prioritization; asks staff to pare questions and favor in-person policy discussion
Summary
After trying a real-time Mentimeter prioritization exercise, council members said the question set felt repetitive and technocratic; they asked staff to reduce the number of questions, focus on legislative/policy items and favor face-to-face discussion in future sessions.
Tumwater council members who participated in a live prioritization exercise on Sept. 9 said the Mentimeter question set felt clunky and repetitive and asked staff to pare the questions to a shorter, more policy-focused set and to favor in-person discussion for future prioritization sessions.
A staff member ran the council through multiple criteria using Mentimeter, including alignment with vision and the comprehensive plan, legal mandates, revenue generation, resource and staffing requirements, opportunity cost and environmental impacts. Several council members said the volume and technical detail of the questions made it difficult to complete the exercise in real time.
Council member Michael Baldak said many of the questions were "technocratic" and better answered by staff reports, and recommended identifying which questions are staff responsibilities and which are council-level policy judgments. Council member Joan Cappen and others said the process felt repetitive and that content could be condensed into a smaller set of questions that speak to policy priorities and trade-offs. Council member Peter Aravalli suggested the council needs a way to see quantified outputs (numeric scores and timelines) to inform their decisions.
As a result, staff agreed to return with a shortened question set emphasizing legislative and policy-level criteria and to conduct the remaining focus-area prioritizations with more facilitated, face-to-face conversation. Staff also offered a hybrid option: brief facilitation and a short numeric ranking (Mentimeter or similar) at the end of each discussion so the council both talks through items and produces a quantifiable order.
No formal change in policy was adopted at the Sept. 9 session; the group agreed on the procedural next step to test a condensed approach at future meetings.
