My city held its first Citizens' Assembly on a Tuesday in October, and I remember thinking it would be another hollow exercise in the appearance of listening. I had been to the town halls. I had signed the petitions. I had watched carefully worded proposals vanish into committee and emerge as something unrecognizable, sanded down to nothing by the machinery of compromise and private interest. I had grown fluent in the language of civic disappointment. But this was different from the first hour
