A couple years ago, our hall went through a remodel. This was another reason I chose to fade out.
We, as a congregation, ended up voting a few times on certain decisions like color schemes and seating types. We were presented with, I think, 4 different color schemes from the society's regional building committee, and we wasted a good portion of the service meeting voting on them. The thing that kinda pissed me off was the vote on whether to choose more expensive movie-theater style seats or cheaper stacking-style seats. There was a $10,000 difference, and at the time I remember a previous meeting with a letter from the GB begging for money for Kingdom Hall building in other, poorer lands. Our hall voted for the more expensive, theater-style seats instead of donating the difference to some other more "worthy" endeavor. Meanwhile, the halls in Africa use wood benches and thatched roofs. Not that I care anymore about all that, but it is just another hypocritical thing about the witnesses. I think the materialism in the congregations I've attended here locally is appalling.
A couple other votes had to do with more minor details concerning the remodel, but you could tell the elders already made up their minds about what they wanted and gave us two options ("Resolutions rubberstamping decisions already made")...what they wanted (played up to sound appealing) and some bogus other option (very obviously down-played to not sound so appealing). The brother in charge of this was a manipulative one...and it showed.
This same elder and his wife and another even more manipulative elder and his wife managed to sneak in a couple modifications to the decorations in the hall without a vote, too....so it's not all handled democratically; sometimes it's done totalitarian-style, too.
