Brookings: A Quorum Walks Into a Barbecue
There is a particular flavor of civic poetry buried in the notice that several members of the Brookings City Council may attend the 4-H Achievement Day BBQ on August 6, and that if enough of them show up to legally constitute a quorum, no official city business will be discussed or acted upon. Nothing will happen. That is the entire point. The city is required by state law to tell you, in writing, ahead of time, that its elected officials are going to eat potato salad near each other on purpose and that this does not count as governing.
It happens again in September, when the Regional Growth Alliance's New Resident BBQ at Hillcrest Park may draw at least four council members, again with the same disclaimer attached like a warning label: gathering, yes; deliberating, no. Picture it as a kind of civic Twister, where the players must contort themselves into proximity without ever touching the mat square marked “zoning.” Or picture it as diplomatic protocol for people who technically outrank each other only on Tuesdays: the mayor and a councilmember can stand six feet apart discussing whether the burgers are done, but should the conversation drift toward, say, the Legacy Addition plat, the whole apparatus of Open Meetings law starts clearing its throat.
It is easy to laugh at this as bureaucratic hairsplitting, the sort of thing that makes South Dakota sound like it runs on the same fussy logic as a jury instructed not to Google the defendant. But sit with it a moment longer and it starts to look less like paranoia and more like a small, unglamorous kindness a town does for itself. Brookings is not so large that its officials are strangers. The same commissioner voting on bridge structures #06-240-123 and #06-240-141 at 8:30 Tuesday morning is standing in line for a hot dog by Thursday evening. The planning commissioner debating a front yard setback variance on Block 5 of the Branch Creek Addition is, by the weekend, just another neighbor at the splash pad. The law exists precisely because the distance between “public official” and “guy at the barbecue” is, around here, roughly the width of a folding table. Somebody has to draw a chalk line so that proximity does not curdle into suspicion, and so that a hamburger bun never accidentally becomes the minutes of an unrecorded meeting.
Meanwhile, the actual machinery of the town keeps grinding along in rooms that are allowed to have quorums on purpose. The Park & Recreation Advisory Board is plotting a September tour that will march its members past the Edgebrook water source, the Dwiggins-Medary skatepark, and the community food forest, presumably taking notes rather than snacks. The County Commission is weighing a solid waste facility permit and canvassing a gubernatorial run-off in the same week it discusses restoring the courthouse cupola, which is either a tidy metaphor for civic renewal or just a very full Tuesday. The Planning Commission, streaming live on Channel 9 for anyone who wants to watch democracy happen in real time, will decide how a chunk of the Legacy Addition gets to unfold for decades to come. All of this is deliberate, minuted, public, and entirely allowed to have as many officials in the room as it likes.
So the barbecue quorum notice, silly as it looks on a public calendar between library origami nights and teen snack pickups, is really a small monument to how seriously a town takes the difference between being together and being in session. It insists that officials can be neighbors first, that a burger is just a burger, and that the business of the county happens in rooms built for exactly that business, not by accident, over paper plates, three bites into a brat. There is something almost tender in a government that has to remind itself, publicly and in advance, to just relax and enjoy the cookout.