Payson Councilman Encourages Civil Discourse

Councilman Doug Welton took a moment earlier this week to encourage civil discourse. “It’s kind of tough

right now,” he said, speaking in the council and staff reports portion of the September 16 council meeting.

“There’s a lot of difficult things going on in the world and I would just ask us to be nice.  We’ve got an

election coming up, we have social issues coming up, we’ve got COVID and big discussions on that.”

The councilman reflected on a visit to Brigham Young University by the social scientist and writer

Arthur Brooks. “He gave a speech and in his speech he said, ‘We don’t need to disagree less. We need

to disagree more, but we need to disagree better’.”

“I think there’s important discussions that we have to have,” Councilman Welton said, explaining that,

out of fear of how others might react, people do not always take part in them.

“I think there’s a lot of tough decisions and I think we should engage in those not just at a city level,

but at the citizen level too.”