A plea to officials at public meetings: Speak up!

The Salt Lake Valley Board of Health held its public/private monthly meeting last week to discuss temporarily suspending a sports-ramp ban for residences, the budget for next year and an obesity initiative, among other things.

It was public in that anyone who wanted to walk through the door could attend.

It was private in that only those actually serving on the board and thus seated around the big wooden table could hear most of the discussions.

Now, I'm that most unfortunate of creatures, a news reporter with a slight hearing loss in one ear, which adds a degree of challenge to my job in certain situations, like when I'm interviewing someone outside while standing on a parking strip that's being mowed. I can do something about that.

It's not usually a problem indoors, but I know enough to find a front-row seat, just in case. Should a reporter stand up in a public hearing and shout, "Louder!"? Probably not.

It wasn't my ears, because when I asked the public health official next to me what someone just said, the response was, "I don't know. They're very hard to hear." And when I talked to some skaters and other audience members afterward, they all said they heard only part of the discussion, depending on where they were seated.

This wasn't held, mind you, in a room with vaulted ceilings and miles of space. It was just a large room, with several rows of chairs facing the large table at the front.

Brian Baade of skateUtah.com was seated to the side, and when he stood up to address the board about his belief that skaters have a right to build ramps in their own backyards and use them, he was easy to hear. I suspect he raised his voice a little because he wanted to be heard and knew, from sitting there, that the audience might as well have gone to breakfast, since they were pretty effectively shut out of following the discussion.

Do I think board members were doing it deliberately? Not at all. So it seems kind of churlish to pick on the board of health, because this problem does not belong solely to them; they're just the most recent example of an ongoing issue. In my quarter century covering news (much of it with excellent hearing), I've attended dozens and probably in fact hundreds of government meetings and public hearings and court proceedings and school board gatherings and planning sessions and town meetings and task force meetings and — you get the idea — that were technically open and effectively shut because no one bothered to raise a voice, plug in a microphone or simply ask the audience if they could hear all right and then make an adjustment.

The same thing often happens at private gatherings where a prayer is said. We all fold our arms or bow our heads or whatever while someone mumbles along. The prayer could be calling the plague down on everyone present, and we'd all say, "Amen."

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