3 years of litigation until all the stakeholders agree on all the aspects of this public toilet are not cheap.
And what if the environmental reviews find a bunny family living at the proposed location? Relocating the bunny family will probably cost another million and 2 years of delay.
You're not even exaggerating. I worked as a contractor some time back for a major Canadian telecom company that no longer exists. I remember spending hours of meetings on calls with no less than 10 stakeholders (and in some meetings senior management) "circling back" to get a decision on button position. Not a single one of these people were a designer/UX person. I'd imagine it's even worse in the public sector.
There is probably some fallacy to explain this. My intuition tells me that if you have meaningless job (or you feel as if) you tend to make big deal out of small decisions, assert your territory of control/reign etc.
This leads to what you described. I guess it also offers an easy cop out for them if the button will be placed in the worst possible way. "Since Jerry was also on the call and I always thought he has final say."
I think we as a society have collectively forgotten that to be a stakeholder in something means you have something at stake. You make people ante up to keep a discussion open (doesn't have to be money, just something that requires non-trivial effort on their part) and you'll very quickly separate out those who have legitimate concerns from those who are just bikeshedding. Require people who want to attend a public comment meeting to do 4 hours of community service, make the default vote an abstention and require anyone who wants to vote yea or nay to write a 500 word essay explaining why, have someone who wants to add new requirements late in the process to put a percentage of their income in escrow until the project is complete, etc. It should be something anyone can do, but only those who really care would be willing to do.
I left a large employer (Irvine based, I think) that would occasionally run into this.
The final straw was a feature that should have taken 15 minutes. It instead took three weeks, because customer support, product owners and the design team couldn't agree on whether the change was necessary or if it would be harmful. Of course, none of this conversation happened until my change was already mostly done and I had to ask a question to clarify something in the ticket's acceptance criteria.
I got dinged because my work took too long... and I immediately started interviewing elsewhere. When good workers leave because they cannot tolerate bad inertia, all you're left with is people who don't mind or find a way to game it, and the problem gets worse.
3 years of litigation until all the stakeholders agree on all the aspects of this public toilet are not cheap.
And what if the environmental reviews find a bunny family living at the proposed location? Relocating the bunny family will probably cost another million and 2 years of delay.