Lehigh County Town Hall Meeting A Bust

What if you held a town hall meeting and nobody showed up?

That exactly what happened Monday night (03/21/2014).
     WFMZ- "Lehigh County town hall draws empty auditorium"

Many people have been critical of he people living in Allentown who don't show up for elections or council meetings. Looks like apathy can be infectious. Then on the other hand unless there's something really irritating people they usually don't. So perhaps Lehigh County Executive Tom Muller should take this as a positive rather then a negative.

There's also another possibility to consider. Unlike times past when there was no other way to communicate with officials in mass, town hall meeting were the way to go. What has worked rather successfully for some are electronic town hall meetings. These can be done online either visually with some such software like Skype or via online chat forum.

There can be several reasons for people not dragging their butts out on a Monday night to show up physically. For some it can be baby sitting issues. For others it can be a chore after working all day to shower, eat and get to each of these physical locations by 6:00pm. Still in other cases many may be at work, making it impossible to attend. There are also those types of people who are self-conscious about getting up and speaking in front of others. All these excuses for not attending can be eliminated by holding future meetings online.

Other then a live forum another possibility may be to have people submit questions in advance on the county's website. Then create a video addressing those question so people can view the responses at their convenience.

I'm not saying there couldn't be a future need for a live town hall meeting. But it would be one way to possibly get people juiced up enough to show up in person. Utilizing this online method can also be used to poll people if they were interested enough in actually having one. Email Sign up notifications would also be a good idea. Unlike in the past, fewer people read the papers, listen to radio or TV like they traditionally once did. More then likely few even had a clue there was a town hall meeting. This goes double for the under 30 crowd.