Police escorted two people out of a Joliet City Council meeting last week, providing a couple of the more awkward moments in a approval process for a controversial data center that some residents said should have been done differently.

The public hearing process for the Joliet Technology Center was the same as hearings for other projects in most ways.

Opposing sides made their case for or against the project with little or any clarification or debate on issues in dispute.

Joliet resident Rita Renwick during the public hearing on March 16 suggested there could have been a better way to review the data center plans before the vote.

The council on March 19 voted 8-1 to approve the plan.

“We should have a public meeting where staff can give all their information, and people can ask questions in a respectful manner,” Renwick said. “If we’re going to do this, we should have people informed so they can trust their government.”

Renwick, who is chair of the city’s Tree Advisory Board, was among a small group of residents who met with staff to ask questions about the project.

She suggested the same format should be used for the public at large.

Instead, the public hearing process provides for the developer to make its case for the project, the public to speak next, and the developer to have a final comment in rebuttal to any objections made.

With roughly five hours of public comment on the project at the public hearing for the data center, it became difficult to focus on the pros and cons.

When David Silverman, attorney for the developers, rose to make his rebuttal to the litany of objections, he was often drowned out at times by people in the crowd, not knowing the procedure and objecting to him having a second chance to speak.

“I don’t want to shout over them,” Silverman eventually said, cutting his rebuttal short.

The moment showed the at-times unruly nature of the opponents. But it also reflected a general silence among city staff at the hearing.

No one laid out the ground rules for the public hearing process when it began. A city planner read a staff report on the project, which laid out reasoning for approval but in a long format that was not necessarily easy to follow.

Developers presented their case with a team of consultants who announced their names and credentials, but nothing was in writing to clarify who was speaking and where they were from.

When the council reconvened on Thursday to vote on the data center, the council chamber was packed with union construction workers who arrived long before the start of the meeting to show their support for the data center.

Opponents, many of them Joliet residents, watched the proceedings on a television screen not only outside the chambers but on another floor of City Hall.

Alicia Morales, a Joliet Junior College trustee who was among data center opponents, said she and others came to the meeting more than an hour before the start time to get a seat in the council chambers.

“Instead, we found the room filled with union members, many of whom don’t even live in Joliet,” Morales told the council after they voted.

The meeting at which the vote was taken included a public comment section, but speakers were advised that they could not specifically speak about the data center, which led to two speakers being removed by police.

Morales during her comments said the city should consider a larger venue than the council chambers for meetings when attendance can be expected to overflow the room.

Many complained that the city did not post any information about the data center project in Spanish.

The city did create a page on its website devoted to data center information.

Renwick described the web page as “all legal documents.”

The page did not include some basic information, including the dates for the public hearing and council vote on the data center.

City Manager Beth Beatty and Mayor Terry D’Arcy did not make themselves available for interviews on the hearing process and suggestions for changes.

Instead, a city spokeswoman emailed a statement attributed to Beatty saying the city follows “procedures established by the Illinois Open Meetings Act for all public hearings.”

“We appreciate the suggestions shared by attendees at last week’s council meeting regarding improvements to the meeting process and will take those ideas into consideration moving forward,” the statement said.