The Village of Saranac Lake has disabled comments on its official Facebook page, limiting resident feedback alongside a restrictive new media policy.
The Village of Saranac Lake's official Facebook page does not allow comments on its posts. There's no comment icon, no comment field — the option simply isn't there. Residents can like a post. They can share it. They cannot ask a question, raise a concern, or respond to anything the village posts.
Combined with the new media policy — which requires village staff to report to management when a journalist contacts them, who they want to talk to, and what they want to discuss — this raises a broader question about how the village handles public engagement.
Government Facebook pages typically allow comments precisely because they create a public, visible space for residents to ask questions and for other residents to see those questions answered — or not answered. Removing the comment function entirely doesn't just block one resident's question. It removes the public record of anyone being able to ask in the first place.
Mayor Kelly Brunette has defended the new media policy as a transparency and accuracy measure, telling the Adirondack Daily Enterprise it's about "knowing who is talking to who about what" and reducing misinformation. Whatever the merits of that argument for press contacts, it doesn't obviously extend to residents commenting on their own village's public posts. A neighbor asking when a road will reopen, or why a budget line increased, is not misinformation. It's the basic function of a town square.
A media policy that routes press contact through two designated spokespeople. A handbook citation for that policy that nobody — not the Enterprise, not a sitting trustee, not us — has been able to locate. And an official Facebook page with no way for residents to respond to what the village posts.
Individually, each of these might have an explanation. Together, they describe a village government that has steadily narrowed the channels through which residents and journalists can ask it anything.
There's a reason most democratic institutions build in ways for the public to talk back — public comment periods at meetings, open letters to the editor, comment sections on government posts. Not because every comment is valuable, but because the willingness to hear unfiltered feedback is one of the clearest signals of whether a government sees itself as accountable to the people it serves or simply responsible for managing them.
Governments that restrict public input tend to share a common justification: they're not silencing anyone, they're just reducing noise, confusion, or misinformation. That argument is rarely wrong on its own terms. Comment sections are messy. Press inquiries are inconvenient. Public meetings can be unruly. But the test of a government's relationship with its residents isn't whether it can justify each individual restriction — it's whether, added together, those restrictions move in one direction only: away from public input, toward centralized control of the message.
Authoritarian and closed systems don't usually announce themselves as such. They arrive one reasonable-sounding policy at a time — a designated spokesperson here, a disabled comment section there — each one defensible, until the cumulative effect is a public that can watch its government but can no longer talk to it.
Saranac Lake is a village of roughly 5,000 people governed by an elected mayor and four trustees. It is not a closed system. But the direction matters. A village that makes it harder, not easier, for residents to ask questions is moving the wrong way — regardless of how reasonable each individual step sounds when explained on its own.