On August 25, an Alliance for Innovation “Civility & Trust” webinar dove into promising ways that two cities confronted controversial issues that were turning neighbors against each other and threatening to overwhelm other city business. 

“Trust and civility are one of the key issues that communities like ours are facing,” said webinar panelist Heidi Behrends Cerniwey, the city manager of Ellensburg, Washington (population about 21,000).  In that city, in 2025, opposing residents had taken to social media to fight each other over the DEI chapter in the city’s comprehensive plan and a petition that had been delivered to City Council to remove it. “Our city business was overtaken by this issue,” Cerniway said.

For fellow panelist Caryn Champine, Transportation Services Director in Ft. Collins, Colorado (population about 170,000), tension had risen over another common polarizing issue – the spreading national controversy over technological surveillance. In this case, the Ft, Collins police department had signed a contract for automatic license plate reading using Flock cameras. In response, large groups of people were showing up during the public comment period of City Council meetings with rising tension erupting over the “polarity between public privacy and public safety,” Champine said.

Reducing the heat level in both cases worked well by helping individuals with opposing views have thoughtful conversations that led to a reduction in misinformation, and an increase in civil discourse away from social media.

In Ellensburg, promotion of a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion approach had followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This initiative had been inserted into the city’s 20-year comprehensive plan, which needs to be updated periodically according to State of Washington law. 

In 2025, an organized move was launched to delete the DEI chapter from the plan, which sparked a swell of activity in favor of keeping it. This “pressure cooker” in the community was heightened by a lot of online disinformation and misinformation about what the comprehensive plan was, what the chapter said and what the policies did. “The two sides were talking past each other,” said Cerniway.  

The city embarked on a collaborative effort to get neighbors to “talk to each other and not past each other”. One approach was suggested by Emily Jacobs, also a webinar panelist and an Ellensburg resident who founded a small company called Story Quilter. Jacobs works with Braver Angels, a national nonprofit that describes itself as the “largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement promoting Courageous Citizenship.”  

The first step was to host community conversations to look at the data that had been collected, get individuals from the separate sides together with a focus on understanding the different points of view, as well as what the DEI chapter actually said.  Out of that initial process a smaller set of individuals was nominated to participate in a more formal facilitated Common Ground Workshop, an approach used by Braver Angels.

At the base of the process, the idea is not to convince each other, but to understand and explain the core elements of the issue and to give the City Council better information to move forward. Ultimately, the Council decided to adapt (not delete) the DEI section, along with revising the name of the plan chapter to “Access, Engagement and Belonging”. 

In Ft. Collins, a different process was followed that made use of its City Council “Futures Committee” to move discussions about Flock camera use away from more formal and structured council meetings where opposing residents delivered short, prepared statements in public comment testimony.

With the culture of the futures committee designed to model curiosity and shared exploration, the temperature of the discussions went down. Less formal discussions welcomed community input using Futurist Hauson Le’s “Causal Layered Analytic” approach “to move beyond surface-level debate and uncover the deeper beliefs, systems and narratives shaping the issue.”

One of the clear results was the City Council’s new understanding of the critical issue that had spurred public tension -- the police department’s signing of the Flock contract without public knowledge or input. So far, no long-term decision on surveillance has been reached, but information from the Futures Committee led to an increased focus on transparency and community input into the directions the city was moving. The Flock contract in question was cancelled, along with a commitment to reexamine the procurement process.

Note: Alliance for Innovation (AFI) is a membership-based nonprofit organization that serves local governments that join as an organization, with fees based on population size. Non-members can currently access news and some of the presentations or webinars, including “Civility & Trust in Local Governments”

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