On a Tuesday evening in November 2025, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management held a public hearing in Uniontown, Alabama, about a proposed capacity increase at the Arrowhead Landfill in Perry County. The landfill had been a source of environmental justice complaints for over a decade. Residents had documented odors, health concerns, and quality-of-life degradation in their predominantly Black, predominantly low-income community.
Two people spoke. A third tried but was unable to due to equipment issues. ADEM officials stated they saw no reason to disapprove the permit changes.
This is not an anomaly. This is how local government works in America.
The Numbers Don't Lie
According to survey data compiled by the National Civic League, only about 12 percent of Americans attended a local public meeting in the past year — down from 18 percent in 2019. In smaller communities, where decisions often carry the most immediate environmental consequences, town hall meetings typically draw between 50 and 200 people out of populations of 10,000 or more. A Vanderbilt University study found that just 10.5 percent of the adult voting-age population in the Americas had attended a municipal meeting in a given 12-month period.
The people who do show up are not representative of the community at large. Research from Boston University found that public meeting attendees skew older, whiter, wealthier, and more likely to be homeowners. Senior citizens — those 65 and older — make up 40 to 50 percent of town hall audiences in many jurisdictions. Renters, young families, shift workers, and non-English speakers are systematically underrepresented.
This means the handful of voices in the room are steering decisions that affect everyone. And in many cases, the decisions being made involve environmental permits, land use changes, and infrastructure approvals with consequences that will last decades.
What Gets Decided in These Rooms
County commission meetings are where the rubber meets the road for environmental governance. State and federal regulations set the floor, but local bodies control zoning, land use, and often the initial permitting decisions that determine whether a facility gets built at all. Consider what a typical county commission might vote on in a single session:
Rezoning requests that convert agricultural or residential land to industrial use. Special-use permits for waste facilities, chemical storage, or wastewater treatment. Consent orders that settle enforcement actions against polluters — often with reduced penalties. Variance approvals that waive setback requirements, buffer zones, or operational restrictions. Budget allocations that fund — or defund — local environmental monitoring.
Each of these decisions carries real environmental weight. And each is typically made after a "public hearing" that may draw fewer attendees than a weeknight church supper.
The Design Problem
It would be comforting to believe that low attendance is simply a matter of apathy — that people don't show up because they don't care. The reality is more structural than that.
Public hearings are, by design, difficult to attend. They are typically held during business hours or in the early evening, when many working people are commuting, cooking dinner, or caring for children. They take place in government buildings that may be unfamiliar or intimidating. The agenda items are written in bureaucratic language that requires specialized knowledge to parse. And the legal notices required to announce these hearings — often buried in the classified section of a local newspaper — are practically designed to be missed.
A 2024 study published by the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago found that renters are frequently not directly notified of land-use hearings that affect their neighborhoods. Notification requirements in most states are tied to property ownership, not residency. If you don't own land within the notification radius, you may never learn that a hearing is happening — even if the proposed facility will be visible from your kitchen window.
California attempted to address part of this problem in 2024 with Assembly Bill 2904, which doubled the public hearing notice period for zoning ordinances from 10 to 20 days. It was a step in the right direction, but extending the notice period matters little when the notice itself is published in a format most people will never see.
The Attendance Paradox
Here is the cruel irony of the system: the communities most affected by environmental decisions are the least likely to participate in the process that authorizes them.
Environmental justice research has documented this pattern for decades. Waste facilities, chemical plants, and polluting industries are disproportionately sited in low-income communities and communities of color. These are the same communities where residents are most likely to work multiple jobs, lack reliable transportation, face language barriers, or distrust government institutions based on lived experience.
The Arrowhead Landfill in Uniontown sits in Perry County, Alabama — one of the poorest counties in the state, with a median household income below $25,000 and a population that is more than 68 percent Black. The landfill began accepting coal ash from the 2008 TVA Kingston Fossil Plant spill in Tennessee, shipping millions of tons of toxic material from a predominantly white community to a predominantly Black one. Residents organized, protested, and filed EPA complaints. But when the formal public hearing arrived — the mechanism the system offers for democratic input — two people spoke.
This is not a failure of civic virtue. It is a failure of institutional design.
What Happens When People Do Show Up
The counterexample is instructive. In December 2025, the Mobile County Commission in Alabama rejected a proposal to expand the Chastang Landfill after years of sustained community opposition. Residents attended meetings consistently, submitted written comments, and organized awareness campaigns. The commission voted against the expansion.
The lesson is not that the system works when people try hard enough. The lesson is that the system requires an extraordinary, sustained effort from ordinary citizens just to function as intended. Showing up once is not enough. You must show up repeatedly, understand the regulatory framework, submit comments in the correct format during the correct window, and hope that your elected officials are responsive to public input rather than to the economic interests of the applicant.
That is an unreasonable burden to place on people who are simply trying to protect their families and their property values.
The Decline of Local News
Compounding all of this is the collapse of local journalism. According to Northwestern University's Medill School, the United States has lost more than 2,900 newspapers since 2005. More than 200 counties — roughly 7 percent of all counties in the country — now have no local news source at all. These "news deserts" correlate strongly with lower civic participation and reduced government accountability.
When a local reporter covers a county commission meeting, the public gets a summary of what happened, who voted how, and what it means. When no reporter is present — which is increasingly the norm — the only record is the official minutes, which are often sparse, delayed, and written by the same body whose actions they document.
Without local journalism, the public hearing becomes a closed loop. The government announces the hearing through channels most people don't monitor, holds the hearing in a room most people can't access, and records the outcome in a document most people will never read. The democratic safeguard exists on paper. In practice, it is a rubber stamp.
What Can Be Done
We do not believe the answer is to abolish public hearings or to abandon the principle of public participation. The answer is to make participation real rather than ceremonial.
Modernize notification. Public hearing notices should be sent by email, text message, and social media — not just published in newspapers that fewer and fewer people read. Notification should be based on residency, not just property ownership. If a proposed facility will affect a neighborhood, every resident of that neighborhood should know about it.
Make meetings accessible. Hybrid meeting formats — offering both in-person and virtual attendance — should be the standard, not the exception. Recordings should be posted online within 24 hours. Written comment periods should extend beyond the hearing itself.
Require plain language. Agenda items involving environmental permits should include plain-language summaries explaining what is being proposed, what the potential impacts are, and how residents can participate. The current system, in which understanding a zoning change requires a law degree, is not transparency — it is gatekeeping.
Fund local reporting. State and county governments should explore mechanisms to support local news coverage of government meetings, whether through public notice advertising requirements, press access provisions, or partnerships with university journalism programs.
Track and publish attendance data. Every public hearing should record and report attendance figures. If a county commission approves a landfill expansion after a hearing attended by three people, that fact should be part of the public record — and part of the public conversation.
The Accountability Gap
At the EPR Foundation, we study the intersection of environmental policy and public accountability. What we see in county commission chambers across the Southeast — and across the country — is a system that has the appearance of democratic oversight without the substance.
The decisions made in these rooms are not trivial. They determine where waste goes, what chemicals enter the groundwater, which communities bear the burden of industrial activity, and which enjoy the benefits of clean air and clean water. These are decisions that shape public health outcomes for generations.
They deserve more than an empty room.
The next time your county commission posts a public hearing notice for a zoning change or permit modification, consider showing up. Better yet, bring a neighbor. The decisions being made in that room will affect your community long after the meeting adjourns. Your presence is the only accountability mechanism the system provides. Use it.