Not usually.
Earlier this year, I spoke on the potential traffic implications of the 300 new apartments next to City Hall and the poor traffic situation of West Broad Street. I did get a "Thank you, Amber" and then some dismissive response from Taylor Anderson, which was also pretty dismissive of Councilman Marc Cohen, who had brought up the issues with West Broad Street at a previous meeting. To Marc's credit, there is much public commentary about that issue, and it needed to be discussed. He was doing what council members are supposed to do. That episode revealed that their problem with me isn't my approach, as they have sometimes tried to claim. It's that any disagreement or discussion isn't well tolerated by the Sugar Hill government overall.
Brandon Hembree took a defensive tone at a meeting once when I questioned the amount of money the City spends on training classes and suggested they could cut back. He said that he thought that training was important, and it seemed to him like anyone would want more training in government, or something to that effect. And while it is good for the gas department and elections staff to have training, I've always wondered what all the training classes are about, especially for elected officials. I believe I indicated as much during my speech. He could have easily included an example or two of training classes he had taken in the past year that were beneficial to the public, but chose not to.
At the 2021 Budget Meetings, I commented that they could trim some fat from their budget and that it's inappropriate that they continue to hold their important financial meetings with poor public notice during major holidays. I got a snarky "That's Ms. Chambers' opinion" from Mayor Steve Edwards in response. That comment was pretty laughable, because those are provable facts for which they still have no real excuse. Furthermore, HAD I voiced an opinion, this is America. We're allowed to have opinions about the government, whether the government likes them or not. The Mayor's poor grasp of this key civic concept was disturbing.
However, the general policy of the Mayor, Council, Downtown Development Authority, and Planning Commission at Sugar Hill is not to respond to people who speak at meetings...unless they feel compelled to voice personal frustration or do damage control.
Apparently, it is also their policy not to take anything said by the public during the public comments or at a hearing under advisement. That is another topic frequently mentioned by people who have attended meetings for Sugar Hill.
I've had a couple of people in the City circle complain about that, saying, "How can people say the City isn't listening when they don't even bother to go to meetings?!"
I go to every meeting. I speak at meetings. While I go consistently, other people have also gone to the meetings. There's no denying what we saw. The City has a reputation for disregarding the public because they deserve that reputation.
In the two and a half years I've been going, no one at City Hall ever seemed concerned about the unusually poor attendance at our City meetings, except to whine about it when criticized for not listening. A responsible, ethical government would want better attendance at meetings. They might conceivably engage in some self-review to see if they can do anything to improve that.
I have not yet seen that happen.