Advice Column: Help from The Senior Advisors September 2025
”Seniors Moments” is an advice column where the innocent and the guilty shall remain nameless. Send your real or imagined, funny or tragic, but always educational problems to the Seniors team, composed of anonymous ICMA Senior Advisors (who shall also remain nameless to protect their reputations ).
Dear Seniors,
My locality is experiencing growing tension between “come-here’s” and “from here’s”, and controversial topics often spawn the sharing of misinformation (especially on social media). What are your thoughts on best practices for bringing folks together on divisive issues? And what’s the best way to share facts while maintaining a public perception of impartiality?
Dear Caught in the Middle,
As usual, this is not an easy one for the Seniors’ brain trust. Nevertheless, here are our thoughts.
We can’t imagine social media as a platform for bringing people together and building community. To us, from a local government perspective at least, it seems best for pushing factual information out to its audience. Any engagement beyond that, such as debate, seems futile.
Perhaps trying some time-tested methods to build consensus may be worth a try. This may be a good time to employ the data plus story approach. The “from here’s” love to talk about their stories and the past while the “come here’s” need to respect and hear the stories. Both groups have to respect indisputable data. Blending data and story to make a point may work. Maybe aninformal gathering to reflect on days gone by (aka storytelling) could help smooth the issue.Then convene another event that blends some data in and attempts to explain why "doing things the way we have always done them" isn't going to work. It all begins with relationship building. Getting to know each other, listening, and trying to understand the different perspectives helps to build mutual respect. If folks will listen to each other, they will probably find that they have much in common that can form the basis for moving forward.
One Senior offered this advice: Without knowing how much money the locality has, a large-group, facilitated meeting - with attendees invited in such a way as to mix up perspectives - might help. It is key to create small discussion groups in such a way that you mix up the points of view, so they all interact with each other. The goal might be to create a general vision of where the community should go, ideas on how to get there, etc. It might also focus on a more specific long-term planning objective, such as overall land use, where development should go and what it takes to focus it there, etc. It can be amazing that when you bring people together who think they are very different, they often realize that they really want at least some of the same general things, though they may have different opinions on how to get there. In the areas where they disagree, it may help for them to talk to each other about why their perspective is what it is. Such a meeting can also make it clearer that solutions may be much more complex and/or expensive than they appear at first glance.
The locality’s elected officials and staff can have an important role in convening a productive meeting between the different groups. We have found that food always helps to relax a gathering, and utilizing selected staff to guide the discussion is helpful. The face-to-face interaction of citizens with the staff and elected leadership is critical to the dialogue.
Having a consistent message from all of the local government officials is essential. At the end of the day, facts are facts, and with that foundation, conversations about different perspectives and approaches can be more productive. We suggest that you post fact sheets on the locality's website, social media, etc., to address important issues; just the facts, maybe with responses to FAQ's but, with no engagement or back and forth, just the facts. Using in-house communications expertise or engaging a third party to help craft a media package could be considered. Be careful with a third-party; without proper guidance it may fuel the fire of debate on an issue.
We hope that these thoughts are useful. Best of success in finding the middle ground!
The Seniors
As always, if this response seems lacking or raises further questions, feel free to reach out and contact a Senior Advisor directly. We are here to assist you navigate your local government management career and enjoy paying back the support that helped us through our careers.
The full list of Senior Advisors with contact information is available here.