Listening in on local leaders talking about why public civility and decorum matter more now than ever before.

In “On the frontlines of today’s cities: Trauma, challenges and solutions," a groundbreaking study released last November, the National League of Cities found that 87 percent of local elected officials surveyed nationwide reported an increase in levels of harassment, threats, and violence during their time in office. For the cover story of this leadership-focused issue, Cityvision convened a panel of Washington local electeds— Pullman Councilmember Francis Benjamin, Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle, Marysville Mayor Jon Nehring, and Auburn Councilmember Yolanda Trout-Manuel—who met in May via Zoom and spent an hour discussing their experiences with instances of civic incivility in their communities, their thoughts about why it’s happening now, and their ideas for what local leaders can and should do about it. What follows is a transcript of that session, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Cityvision: Councilmember Benjamin, as a Washington State University political science adjunct professor, you’ve researched and written about civility in politics. What’s your definition of civility, and how does leadership factor into that?

Francis Benjamin: Civility is where, in the midst of a conversation, you are focused on the individual, and you care about what they feel and why they feel the way they do. It’s showing that you care enough about the individual that you want to understand why they feel the way they do. You’re interested in their perspective. This is not necessarily agreement; you can be very civil but disagree. Another piece is having intellectual humility, that is, recognition that even though I have very strong beliefs, I also know there’s a possibility that I might be wrong. And so there is that openness to hear the information that’s presented in order to evaluate whether or not I’m wrong. If you start with that attitude, take time to find out why people feel the way they do, it can help overcome potential conflict.

Cityvision: When do problems tend to happen?

Francis Benjamin: When the passion on a topic exceeds the value of the relationship with the person that you’re relating with: when you stop caring about the person you’re talking to and become more focused on the topic and drawing a line in the sand. If we look over the last 140 years, we’re in one of the greatest polarization times among parties, and we’re also seeing lack of trust filtering from the federal into the state and local levels.

Cityvision: What’s driving this?

Francis Benjamin: Issues that used to be seen as very nonpartisan are becoming partisan. And that’s creating a greater challenge for elected officials to be able to work together.

Yolanda Trout-Manuel: [Political] parties are what have really hurt and caused a lot of this, from what I have seen. I have had very close friends that didn’t know what party I was, and as soon as they found out what party I was, they started treating me completely different.

That’s what helps with that decision-making process: politeness, courtesy, respect on both sides, whether it’s all of the council being civil to each other, with the individuals that are in your audience coming to talk to you, or even if you’re at the carrot section at Safeway.
– Anne McEnerny-Ogle, Vancouver Mayor

Cityvision: How do you think social media, and the self-selecting silos it tends to create, factors into this situation?

Jon Nehring: One of the things we’re plagued by is that we don’t seem to have anything we belong to that’s bigger than ourselves. So many seem to be in an echo chamber, only wanting to hear from those who will validate what they feel. And it seems like it’s more important for people now to be right than to get it right. We’re not as curious anymore. When I’m confronted by somebody with an opposing point of view, I want to be genuinely curious about why they feel that way and want to find out if they could convince me that they are right. But that’s almost threatening to people now. We just don’t even want to hear what we don’t want to hear, because our identity is all about being right.

Cityvision: Did holding public meetings only over Zoom during the pandemic also exact a toll?

Anne McEnerny-Ogle: Before the pandemic, after a city council meeting or a town hall, people would leave the building and continue the conversation in the parking lot—“What were you thinking with that comment? Did I miss something? Was I not hearing something? Were you going down a path I need to follow you on?” The conversations on a Zoom meeting stop when you press Leave Meeting; it doesn’t go into the parking lot. So for two years we stopped doing that, we stopped building those relationships with colleagues, and that had a negative impact.

Cityvision: Did that also impact the relationship between city officials and the public?

Anne McEnerny-Ogle: It did. And it showed up with threats and violence and protests about the mandates for vaccines and masks, because when the governor made those mandates and we supported them, boom, things lit up around here. We had protesters standing out in the streets and on the sidewalks in front of the electeds’ homes with long arms. And that surprised us.

Leadership sets the standard, both at work and in politics. People are going to look to the lowest leadership standard, and then that’s the bar they use. The higher the standard we can have as a whole, it’s better overall.
– Francis Benjamin, Pullman Councilmember

Cityvision: Mayor Nehring, how have things played out in terms of civility, or lack thereof, in your community?

Jon Nehring: With city business, it actually hasn’t been that bad. Fortunately, we have a really solid working relationship between the executive branch here and our city council. The times when there has been more division in our community have typically been when there also has been division among the governing body.

Cityvision: What’s the lesson there?

Jon Nehring: Whether it’s incivility among residents toward each other or residents toward city officials or among city officials and themselves, we all should have a responsibility to hold to an ideal of treating everybody civilly and with respect and dignity. But I do think as elected officials, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. And I think we have a special responsibility with these positions to figure out a way to lead in that manner. Whether it’s on Zoom or in person at council meetings, people seeing civility being modeled by their leadership makes it a little harder for citizens to really attach themselves to a side and get uncivil.

Yolanda Trout-Manuel: For me, it’s all about respect, politeness, and courtesy. How I have always led my life as a leader is to treat others the way I want to be treated, with those three words: respect, politeness, and courtesy.

Anne McEnerny-Ogle: Modeling a code of behavior, so to speak. Jon, do you communicate your conduct guidelines at each meeting or post signs in your city hall?

Jon Nehring: Good question. We really don’t. It’s more relationship based, kind of back to what Francis talked about earlier. We just invest a lot in relationships. Our entire council goes to conferences together, so there’s a lot of meal time and relationship time there. The pandemic did impact this, but we’re back meeting live now. After our last meeting ended, people were hanging out at city hall for a half hour, 45 minutes, even an hour after that, still talking. And so I think it’s just getting to know one another outside the glare of the meeting, whether that’s informally like hanging out before or after council meetings or intentionally going to a conference together every year.

Francis Benjamin: Most communities have a code of ethics but don’t have a code of conduct as it relates to conduct among electeds. Where you get into trouble is when there’s a conflict or one councilmember says one thing and another one says another thing, and they take offense (even though offense wasn’t intended), because of the word that was used or how it was interpreted….You need a code of conduct for these situations.

Cityvision: Councilmember Trout-Manuel, could you share examples of positive ways you have dealt with incivility, whether it’s resident-to-council or council-to-council?

Yolanda Trout-Manuel: With my residents, what I do is I go and talk to them, and I just explain myself and the reasons why I voted the way I did. And the majority of the time I have turned them around to say, “Oh yeah, I see your point.” With councilmembers, I have had to sit down and talk to them as well.... I just told them that we are here for our constituents, and we need to treat each other with respect.

Francis Benjamin: Leadership sets the standard, both at work and in politics. People are going to look to the lowest leadership standard, and then that’s the bar they use. The higher the standard we can have as a whole, it’s better overall.

Cityvision: Have you experienced instances of threats and violence or been on the receiving end of harassment or incivility in your community as a local elected official?

Yolanda Trout-Manuel: The only [time] it has happened to me is because my first language is Spanish. Some people, just because of their language or their education, they’re treated differently, they’re treated disrespectfully.

Anne McEnerny-Ogle: We’ve had several different incidents. We have had people show up with weapons at city hall and stand there in an intimidating fashion on a difficult issue. So we take each risk and evaluate it.

Cityvision: Councilmember Benjamin, maybe it goes back to that point you made about people getting so passionate about an issue that they draw lines in the sand.

Francis Benjamin: When cities first start out, because of their size they’re mainly focused on safety and infrastructure: police, fire, roads, water, sewer, and most likely a library. But as the city grows and gets more people, the community has these social issues that it wants the city to take on. And that’s where you get into some of these lines drawn in the sand, where one person feels the city needs to take on this social issue for this reason, or in this way, while somebody else has a very different view.

It tends to lower the temperature when respond and we don’t respond in kind, and just say, “Hey, look, I’m not sure why you feel that way, but here’s actually what’s happening.”
– Jon Nehring, Marysville Mayor

Anne McEnerny-Ogle: And that line in the sand keeps moving. So many times, the individuals we’re dealing with are not Vancouverites. They’re from nearby areas, coming down to tell us what they think should happen in our city.

Cityvision: That might also be another impact of social media and Zoom meetings, where these issues that were local issues now suddenly become amplified because they reach an audience outside city limits—sometimes far beyond. And all of a sudden, you have people who aren’t from or even familiar with your community who are suddenly making noise.

Francis Benjamin: Some people, their passion in life is to comment on other cities. In letters to the editor or comments on social media, if you start diving into those issues that are the most controversial, the person often doesn’t even live in your town.

Cityvision: Other than adopting a code of conduct as you suggested earlier, what’s one practical thing all local leaders can do to foster civility?

Francis Benjamin: Our process is critical. When government is making a decision, there are going to be winners and losers. We need to make sure the process is done in a way that people feel they’ve had a fair opportunity to comment on it. As long as people feel that the process was open, that everybody had their voice heard and the decisions were made in an open and fair way—nothing was done behind the scenes—even if they didn’t win, they are more likely to support it and move forward.

Cityvision: And Mayor Nehring, from your point of view over in Marysville?

Jon Nehring: Especially in a growing community like ours, there usually isn’t a way to give everybody what they want, but communication is so critical. Where people really seem to get angry is when they feel that they weren’t included in a process. We had a group that wanted to put pallet shelters at a church that was adjacent to a significant housing area in the community, and those folks were very, very vocal—probably as vocal as I’ve ever seen on an issue. They felt like, “Wow, we were not consulted enough. Why was this location chosen? Is there not a better location?”

Cityvision: What was the lesson learned from that experience?

Jon Nehring: It’s just opening up lines of communication as soon as possible, and keeping them open, and letting everybody weigh in. That doesn’t always make everybody happy by any stretch, but people want to be heard, and they’re going to be heard one way or another. It’s better if you proactively seek out their input.

Cityvision: Mayor McEnerny-Ogle, what about from the larger city perspective?

Anne McEnerny-Ogle: It’s pretty much the same: a lot of citizen engagement. Jon, we just opened our second community of pallet shelters. We built our first one over on the east side, and neighbors near the second one we proposed went over to the first one and talked to the folks over there to see how successful it was. Because we are so large—we’re nearly 200,000 people over 52 square miles—when we have a decision we need to make, the first thing my staff, our councilmembers, and I do is go out into the communities and walk the sidewalks….Then, everyone has many opportunities to talk during a workshop with staff at the first reading. During the second reading at the public hearing, there are opportunities for individuals to attend via Zoom or a phone call to get those points of view out there, but then we set the boundaries of how we’re going to take public communication: nothing slanderous or threatening or personally abusive. If things get heated, we take a break and calm things down, then bring the business back to order. Keep it at a positive level, but plan for the worst—and be ready, just in case.

Jon Nehring: We’ve got to encourage people that it’s OK to not always get it right. And that occasionally means admitting maybe we’re wrong. And as leaders, when we can do that, I think it sets an example. It tends to lower the temperature when we respond and we don’t respond in kind, and just say, “Hey, look, I’m not sure why you feel that way, but here’s actually what’s happening.”

If we see someone being uncivil and we do nothing, then we’re approving it. As leaders, we need to be able to say, “Stop this. Stop this right now.”
– Yolanda Trout-Manuel, Auburn Councilmember

Cityvision: Do you have an example of that?

Jon Nehring: We had an issue here with garbage rates. We had to raise them, and it was primarily due to our contract with Waste Management. It went out to bid; nobody bid on it, nobody wanted the business except for Waste Management, so we had to take that rate. When I got questioned by somebody [at the next council meeting], my response was, “Hey, I have to pay the same rate you do. I live here. All the councilmembers are paying this rate. We don’t like it either, but if we don’t pass that cost along to you, your utility’s going to go bankrupt in a few months. What would you think would be a better option?” Nine times out of 10, they’ll say, “Wow, I wasn’t aware of that.” Just by questioning them and asking, “Hey, what’s your proposal in this situation?” That usually leads to a better mutual understanding of where we are at.

Anne McEnerny-Ogle: Jon, in that entire conversation, you were polite, you were courteous, and you showed respect. And it was a conversation. And I think that’s what helps with that decision-making process: politeness, courtesy, respect on both sides, whether it’s all of the council being civil to each other, with the individuals that are in your audience coming to talk to you, or even if you’re at the carrot section at Safeway. All of that is calming it down and just listening.

Yolanda Trout-Manuel: Again, politeness, courtesy, and respect. It starts from the top. If we see someone [being uncivil] and we do nothing, then we’re approving it. As leaders, we need to be able to say, “Stop this. Stop this right now.” And until that happens, until we can all work together, this is going to continue.        At the National League of Cities conference in November, I spoke with electeds from California, Michigan, and Oregon who had only been in office not even a year, and they’re thinking of dropping out because it’s so hard and mentally stressful for them. I personally told them not to quit, that there was a reason they ran [for public office], and just stick to that.

Francis Benjamin: This is a tremendously big issue….When I approach people about running for office, they look at me and say, “Why would I subject myself to that?” We need to help people understand the value and importance of being a servant in our community, which is really what the elected officials are. But we also need to take care of them.

Cityvision: And each other.

Yolanda Trout-Manuel: When all of us can agree to disagree and come out of it still friends, we come together. And I have seen that in some of the committees that I have been on. I still have hope that we can continue to do that. I really do.