A local governing body is weighing making its return to hybrid meetings a year after it began exclusively meeting virtually, citing the benefits of face-to-face interactions with constituents and the online format’s technological challenges. 

The Foggy Bottom and West End Advisory Neighborhood Commission transitioned to virtual meetings for its April 2024 meeting due to challenges setting up the meeting’s audio system in the West End Library, which 2A08 Commissioner Jim Malec, the body’s chair at the time, said was meant to be a temporary change. But issues hiring an executive director — an administrative ANC position in charge of organizing meetings and outlining agendas — coupled with technological hurdles, like setting up microphones and difficulties finding a location, have prevented the ANC from returning to hybrid meetings for the last 11 months.

Commissioners are now considering transitioning back to hybrid meetings, with some saying that community members should have the opportunity to meet their elected officials face to face. The decision is pending whether the body can find a meeting spot that will accommodate their long, late-night meetings and overcome technological troubles.

Before April 2024, the ANC held its meetings in a hybrid format, giving community members and commissioners the option to join a Zoom call or attend in person at the West End Library since transitioning back in July 2022 after a pause to in-person meetings during the pandemic. Of the District’s 46 regional ANC bodies, 16 hold hybrid meetings, 28 hold virtual meetings and two hold in-person meetings, according to the Office of ANC’s website.

Malec said he is a “firm believer” that every resident should have the opportunity to come before government officials in an in-person setting. He said the dynamic is different in a virtual setting where constituents can’t look commissioners in the eye while raising community concerns.

“Residents have a right to come stand before their government officials and look them in the eye, in a face-to-face setting, including complaining, complimenting, criticizing, whatever they feel is appropriate within the limits of the law,” Malec said.

Malec said representatives from the D.C. government who make announcements and collect feedback at meetings often don’t turn their cameras on during the Zoom meetings, which he finds “disrespectful” to constituents. He added that when constituents are in the same room as representatives from the D.C. mayor’s or D.C. Council’s offices, they can have side conversations, but on Zoom, every question and answer is on the record, which can prompt a more “vague” response from District government officials.

Malec said the ANC’s former long-time executive director, Peter Sacco, designed a hybrid meeting model “from the ground up” years ago that worked with the West End Library’s sound system and allowed those on the Zoom call to hear all in-person comments, even if the person wasn’t near the laptop hosting the call.

Malec said Sacco went outside his responsibilities as executive director to set up the hybrid meetings, arriving two to three hours early to set up the sound system.

“He created this in a way where it was the best hybrid meeting system in the city,” Malec said. “It was fantastic.”

But when Sacco left his role in February 2024 after serving in the role since 2016, Malec said the ANC struggled to keep up with the “complicated” setup.

Malec said Sacco trained him on the system before he left the role, but Malec said when he tried to do it on his own for the first time in March 2024, it took about five hours, and he had to call Sacco for help and then burned out about half of the ANC’s microphones by setting them up incorrectly.

“I realized pretty quickly that without some kind of support, either from my colleagues on the commission or another executive director, that was not going to be sustainable,” Malec said.

Malec announced at the March 2024 meeting that the ANC would hold meetings virtually until the body hired a new executive director. He said the ANC had a difficult time hiring for the position before it hired its current executive director, Shelem Celis, in September.

Still, he said, the former hybrid model was too time consuming to set up, so it didn’t seem “reasonable” to ask or expect a new executive director to implement it, as it would require them to work beyond their dedicated hours.

Malec said he has “raised the issue” three times with other commissioners that they should find a new way to return to hybrid meetings since his term started in January. He said there is “general support” for hybrid meetings, but there has been “no specific conversation” about how to do it. 

He said if the commission were to hold hybrid meetings, they would likely need to find a new meeting spot. He said the West End Library, where they used to meet, wanted to place time restraints on meeting length because the ANC is required to have a security guard present, and they didn’t want to stay past about 10:30 p.m. 

The ANC’s most recent meeting, which started at 7 p.m., lasted until about 12:30 a.m. because of the meeting’s lengthy agenda and long comments from community member attendees.

2A01 Commissioner and ANC Vice Chair Keaton DiCapo said returning the ANC to hybrid meetings is one of the “big things” he plans to work on as a commissioner over the next two years because he said hybrid meetings allow community members to easily find commissioners in person and push the ANC to be more efficient during their meetings if a space has a time limit.

He said in-person meetings also humanize people and can settle heated tensions that often brew at the local governing body’s meetings.

DiCapo said he plans to attend other neighborhoods’ ANC meetings that utilize hybrid models to get a sense of how they technically conduct meetings and to learn how they secured a long-term meeting space. He said in particular, he wants to attend the hybrid meeting of ANC 2E — which represents the Georgetown, Burleith and Hillandale neighborhoods — to learn about how they arranged to meet routinely in a private elementary school. 

DiCapo said he’s been looking into potential local meeting spaces at nearby schools, like the School Without Walls, GW and the John Francis Education Campus in West End, adding that he’s hoping to find an in-person meeting space that accommodates long meeting times and is centrally located in the governing body’s jurisdiction. 

“Being able to go in person and see your elected officials at work doing things for the community is very important,” DiCapo said.

2A03 Commissioner and ANC Chair Trupti Patel said she doesn’t think the hybrid meeting setup the ANC previously used is “practical” anymore because the ANC’s executive director works a full-time job and shouldn’t be expected to spend three hours setting up a hybrid sound system. 

Patel said as chair, her focus now is to ensure that the ANC’s two new commissioners, DiCapo and 2A09 Commissioner Sean Youngstone, and the new executive director can adjust to being part of the commission before overhauling the meeting setup. She said she intends to return to hybrid meetings this term but only when everyone feels “comfortable,” adding that she’d rather give “grace” to her team than start hybrid meetings as quickly as possible.

“We also have to be pragmatic and realistic about the challenges we face,” Patel said.