When people run for public office, they often bring up their desire to get the public more engaged in what the government does. If they are running for school board, they want more than just a few people to show up at meetings. The same goes for city and county government.

While those government bodies make decisions that can immediately change the day-to-day life of the community, more often than not the public doesn’t turn up.

What’s the answer? Nobody has a great answer.

But it sure would help if the public could find out in advance what important issues are going to be discussed. Many government bodies in Central Oregon are good about posting agendas and background materials about a week in advance. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t happen.

Bend has a committee meeting this week to make important recommendations about how the city could be more green — to lower its carbon footprint. There’s another committee meeting this week working on making recommendations for parking downtown. And still another committee is meeting this week to make broad recommendations about the future of transportation in Bend and how to pay for it.

Those meetings are just a few days away and as of first thing Monday morning, no agendas were posted. Yes, it’s likely they will be posted before the meetings — they almost always are. (Sure enough, the transportation meeting agenda popped up just before we published this on our website.)

The problem is most people have enough going on in their lives that the prospect of going to a government meeting is not going to be on the list if they don’t know what’s coming up far in advance. Social media can be great at spreading the word, but the message needs time to get out.

We don’t have any reason to believe that people in government are deliberately withholding agendas to keep public input to a minimum. Not posting well in advance, though, is effectively doing the same thing.