The proposed constitution was agreed upon in June of 2023
Now that there was a proposed constitution, the proper thing was to poll the citizenry.
And luckily, they had a way to do that. Mab’s newspaper, the Zero Hour, was about to launch. The infrastructure had been built, the first edition was being structured, but wasn’t ready yet.
So the poll was officially the 0th issue of Zero Hour.
The Constituent Assembly debated what options they should include in the poll, not particularly wanting to include option 4 or distinguish between options 1 and 2 which looked almost identical at this point. But they decided that the fairest thing was to use the original four options laid out by the Tuesday Group, along with another question of asking about how people felt about the currently proposed constitution if there was a government formed.
Support for a local government had overwhelming support, winning by 77%, and presumably the 4% who pick ‘full succession’ would also be happier with local government than the current status. So at least 4/5ths of the population wanted local control over Haven.
The constitution itself also did pretty well, at 65% support, and the major complaint online was grumbling that it seem too complicated and technical, which is not particularly a good complaint about a founding legal document and is not really solvable.
And the Constituent Assembly now had a proposal approved by the citizenry and were going to going to petition Project Zero to formally create the provisional government and give them funding, and their job would be to schedule an official vote on the proposed constitution, and then follow that with election and procuring a building.
There was a very firm plan, created by Catherine. It was handed over by much fanfare in July of 23HY
The problem was that Project Zero did not seem to have any real interest in this. They didn’t oppose any of it, they had been kept in the loop for everything, and had even said, on record, that they had no problem with it, and they’d look into it.
And ‘we will look into it’ was basically the only response the Constituent Assembly got.
A month passed. No new meetings had been scheduled, because the plan was for the provisional government that Project Zero created to start meeting. And they had not created it.
Another month passed. And another.
It was now October. No response.
Probably because, as Ambrose Bierce constantly pointed out in various flowery ways, Project Zero was a layer of bureaucrats that existed entirely to insulate everyone from another layer of three different sets of bureaucrats that were the three MTPs, and Project Zero probably had to debate this for at least three months before sending it up so the MTPs could all debate it for six months.