When Every Notice Looks the Same, None of Them Do
Brookings has a transparency problem, but not the kind anyone wants to hear about. The city isn't hiding anything. If anything, it's disclosing too much, too often, in language so repetitive that it risks teaching residents to stop reading the very notices meant to keep them informed.
Look at the summer calendar. A quorum notice for the 4-H Achievement Day BBQ on August 6. Another for the New Resident BBQ on September 15. Three separate notices for Downtown at Sundown, on July 30, August 6, and August 13. A fourth for Meet State at SDSU on August 21. Each one says essentially the same thing: several council members might show up, a quorum might technically form, but no city business will be discussed or acted upon. This is boilerplate required by state open-meetings law, and the city is right to file it. But six near-identical notices in six weeks, all announcing that nothing will happen, train residents to read “quorum notice” as a synonym for “ignore this.”
That's a problem, because not every notice this summer says nothing will happen. On July 30, the same night as a Downtown at Sundown quorum notice, the actual City Council met and took up real business: a public hearing on leasing city property to RTI, LLC, a second reading on a budget amendment, and a hearing to annex two outlots into city limits. These are the kinds of decisions that shape how land gets used and who profits from it. They deserve scrutiny. But they were surrounded, that same week, by a cloud of routine notices about barbecues and street festivals, all using the same civic language, the same format, the same “no business will be conducted” reassurance. A resident skimming the public notices could be forgiven for lumping them all together and moving on.
This is not an argument against the law. Open-meetings statutes exist because quorums have a way of becoming informal decision-making sessions if nobody's watching, and South Dakota is right to require disclosure whenever enough council members might be in the same place at the same time. The problem isn't the law. It's that the city is applying the letter of the requirement without much thought to how the requirement is communicated, and the result is a kind of notice fatigue that works against the law's purpose.
Some will say this is a minor gripe, that residents who care about local governance will read the agendas regardless of how many BBQ notices clutter the calendar. Maybe. But most people don't parse city communications for a living. They skim headlines, and if six headlines in a row say “nothing to see here,” the seventh gets the same treatment by default, even if it's the one about an actual land deal.
There's a simple fix, and it doesn't require changing any law. The city could distinguish, in format and framing, between notices tied to substantive meetings and notices tied to purely social gatherings. A single seasonal notice, filed once, could cover all the summer's Downtown at Sundown dates and community BBQs where council presence is expected but no action is planned. That would satisfy the legal requirement without repeating the same non-event announcement five or six times across a summer. It would also free up attention, both the city's and the public's, for the notices that actually matter: hearings on annexation, leases, rezoning, budget amendments.
Transparency isn't just about filing the right paperwork. It's about making sure people can tell the difference between a barbecue and a decision. Right now, Brookings is technically compliant and functionally noisy, and noise is its own kind of obscurity. If the city wants residents to keep paying attention when it counts, it needs to stop asking them to pay the same attention to everything.