Using scheduled in-person public meetings as your default method of public engagement is terrible -- practically designed to generate terrible outcomes. An open meeting with a public comment period is purely a forum for the naysayers to congregate and berate the city council, why creating an echo chamber where the naysayers get their view confirmed, generating a bitter group of people who (absurdly) claim the council ignored 'public opinion' and that democratic processes are being ignored. Which is absolute catnip for a specific variety of concern-trolling-click-bait-publishing 'local' journalist.
We mandate public meetings because we wanted to do away with decisions being made in smoke-filled rooms on a nebulous basis. And then extended it to include public comment because meetings otherwise just become announcements of the policy made in smoke-filled rooms. But it's trivial to ignore comments made in public meeting, so we mandated that they be collected and made a matter of public record. And so we arrived at the Decide-Announce-Defend paradigm anyone who works in infrastructure is familiar with.
We should recognize that this format is a sub-par outcome, a Rube Goldberg kludge of fixes-on-fixes, and not something any sane person would design to actually engage the public.
Being a public official is tough--constantly asked to make important decisions on a multiplicity of topics on which lack technical expertise, and so you are really reliant on: A) what you staff says, and B) what your personal network says. So it is easy to get a skewed view of what the public supports or will at least accept, and how widespread opposition actually is. And public meetings only serve to make this worse, because of the availability bias---the only people you'll see is the NIMBY chorus, so opposition appears firm and monolithic.
Which is one of the reason activism is so effective - just having one person show up at a meeting with a contrary point of view destroys the illusion created by availability bias. This dynamic works both ways--it's also the same technique climate denialists have used exploited to artificially induce doubt about an overwhelming scientific consensus.
This also offers implications for how to effectively present to a public audience. Rhetorically, it's called "planting a naysayer" a. While you are presenting, you say: "My opponent will say" and then refute it. It's an incredibly effective technique, because it ties your refutation to any further reference of that issue. Example:
"Folks here will say that building more houses doesn't improve affordability, but the empirical evidence is clear: places that built more apartments have more affordable rent. The bigger the city, the more apartments you have to build to move the needle. Of course the effects of a scant handful of new homes is imperceptible".