Every Public Meeting Now Happens in Three Rooms

The Three Rooms Principle for Public Meeting Communications

By Tanya Castaneda, APR | September 30, 2026

On Sept. 21, the city council of a mid-sized city in the Midwest held one meeting. The public saw three.

The item was a proposed review of the city's use of automated license plate reader cameras. The agenda stated: "Citizens May Speak."

Dozens of residents came to ask the council to end the contract, but things didn't go the way they expected. They did not get to speak. By the end of the evening, law enforcement was involved — and soon, people all over the country were talking about what happened at that meeting in Springfield, Missouri.

The room where the meeting took place could hold up to 159 people. The city's official livestream was watched by 6,600 people. On X, posts about the meeting reached a potential audience of roughly 19 million. On Reddit, estimated potential reach runs into the hundreds of millions.

Most agencies still plan for the 159 seats.

When I advise public agency leaders, I ask them to picture every meeting happening in three rooms at once. I call it the Three Rooms Principle.

Room One conducts the meeting

Room One is the chamber where the meeting takes place. There's a dais, a podium and the people who keep the meeting orderly: the clerk, the city attorney, the officer at the back wall. It runs on rules, a gavel and an agenda. Public agencies have decades of expertise in managing it.

So, what happened at the Springfield meeting?

Residents had organized before the meeting. They planned to speak in public comments to share their concerns. But before anyone could speak, the mayor moved to send the item to committee. The motion passed 5-3, and the room erupted with loud shouts.

Later, a resident used public comment on another item to talk about the cameras anyway. When she mentioned the license plate readers, the mayor interrupted her. She raised both middle fingers at the council. Her mic was cut. A police officer approached her and could be heard on camera saying, "You're under arrest. Put your hands behind your back."

Every decision Springfield made that night was a Room One decision.

The motion to refer to committee.

The interruption.

The microphone turned off.

The arrest.

Referral to committee is an ordinary, defensible tool, and each of these actions reflects a very human response to what was happening in the room. The city attorney could defend every one of them under the rules of Room One.

Room Two broadcasts the meeting

When I started my career more than two decades ago, you had to be there. Watching a public meeting meant driving to city hall, and speaking at one meant giving your name to the clerk and waiting your turn.

Now there are more options for people who want to view or participate.

Room Two is the livestream, the cable channel and the remote comment line. It broadcasts the whole meeting to people who chose to watch. Over the past decade, and especially since the pandemic, Room Two grew from a convenience into a standard way of operating. In some states, remote access is now a legal requirement for many local legislative bodies.

Many journalists no longer attend meetings in person. They monitor and report from the livestream.

Room Two gives an agency a record of something important when a meeting goes sideways: context. The full recording shows what came before the outburst, the warnings, the rules and the tone of the dais. Anyone watching it can get a sense of the whole situation.

In Springfield, 6,600 people watched the meeting on the city's Facebook livestream. Only about a dozen reacted with the "angry" emoji.

The people who saw the whole meeting online barely reacted. But the people who saw 20 seconds of it in their feed erupted.

Room Three interprets the meeting

Room Three is where someone captures a piece of the meeting, often 10 or 20 seconds on a phone, adds a caption and puts it into circulation.

Algorithms then deliver it to people who never went looking for it. Picture someone in another state, scrolling at midnight, who has never heard of your city. She watches 14 seconds, forms an opinion and keeps scrolling. 

Room Three decides what the meeting meant.

There were dozens of important items of public business on Springfield's agenda. But in Room Three, the meeting showed up as its most dramatic moment: the arrest.

The local TV station ran: "VIDEO: Person arrested for flipping off City Council, railing on [license plate] cameras."

A national, independent news site ran: "Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Quietly Speaking About [License Plate Cameras] at City Council Meeting."

I watched the full recording. The mayor interrupted her, she raised both middle fingers, her mic was cut, and she was arrested.

The local headline left out the interruption, and the national headline left out the gesture. That was important context, and you had to look for it yourself. The only way to see the whole sequence was to watch Room Two.

The national version traveled, and The New Republic picked it up within days.

What looks like control of Room One can backfire in Room Three

Here is the pattern executives should study. Each step Springfield took to restore order in Room One weakened its position in Room Three.

The referral took away residents' chance to speak, so one of them found another way to be heard. That became its own story.

Cutting the microphone and making an arrest produced exactly the footage Room Three rewards: a public body silencing someone who came to express her views.

None of this means anyone on the dais acted with bad intent. But it signals a team that prepared for one room while three were open.

Agencies across the country are rewriting their rules for public comment and decorum. Each change can solve the problem in front of the dais. But is anyone thinking about Room Three?

Room Three stays open after Room One closes

This is the heart of the Three Rooms Principle: the room with the greatest reach is the room the agency controls the least. It also never adjourns.

If a council adjourns at 8:30 p.m., Rooms One and Two go dark, but Room Three keeps working. Overnight, clips get shared on social media. Reporters file their stories. Advocates post AI-generated memes. City employees get texts from their families.

Residents who didn't attend the meeting hear about it and form opinions about it. By morning, the public record of that meeting is whatever Room Three made of it.

And that's how people in California, Washington, D.C. and New York came to form opinions about a council meeting in a Midwestern city they had never given a second thought.

Most agencies prepare for a contentious meeting with the executive team, the clerk, the city attorney and law enforcement. Few include a communications voice who can advise on how the meeting will show up in Room Three.

So before your next contentious meeting, ask your executive team one question: Who in this building owns Room Three, and what do they do at 8:31 p.m.?

The Three Rooms Principle was developed by Tanya Castaneda of PRM Consulting. Communicators are welcome to use and share it with attribution.