The Bend City Council essentially shut down one of its tools for neighborhood engagement in May, arguing that it might have better neighborhood engagement without it.

Did it work?

We don’t know. But we thought we would check if the city did everything it said it was going to do to boost neighborhood engagement in its place.

The short answer: Yes.

That doesn’t make for much of a hard hitting editorial, of course. But we surely would have written about it if the city didn’t do them, so it’s only fair that we point out it did do them.

Bend has had something called the Neighborhood Leadership Alliance. It was sort of like a super group of members of its neighborhood districts. The thinking was if the city cut out the middleman and had more direct engagement, it would get better feedback.

The Neighborhood Leadership Alliance was not eliminated. It was put in hibernation. And the city vowed to do five things to improve outreach: create a block party trailer program; have a launch party for that; hold quarterly community gatherings; have biannual roundtables and listening sessions with neighborhoods; and hold some council meetings at places other than just in City Hall.

Some of those are works in progress, but progress is being made.