Opinion: encourage public participation at City Council meetings and remove speech restrictions
Thomas Shafer advocates for transparency and free speech
Author: Thomas Shafer
Go to a Kootenai County Board of Commissioners meeting and you can see how there can be a lively Q&A between citizens and their elected representatives. At the most recent gathering, because of open meeting laws, the commissioners were sorting out some difficult financial issues related to the new Justice Building. But the difficult exchange didn’t end there. The public weighed in with challenging inquiries of their own. Commissioners Brooks, Duncan and Mattare accepted them in stride and answered respectfully. The public comment was insightful and helpful. This is the way our government open meetings should occur. But not so in Hayden City Hall.
The Hayden City Council meetings occur the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month at 5pm sharp. Did you know that the public is NOT allowed to comment on anything posted on the meeting agenda? In legal parlance, this is called “content-based restrictions”. It’s all for the better you know. Can’t have the public weighing in, so that government can run more efficiently. Content based restrictions are presumptively unconstitutional. Essentially, government is compelled to have the least restrictive rules in order to accomplish the governmental interest [Cornell Law School, Amdt 1.7.3.1].
It doesn’t end there. There are two more ways in which the process of Hayden council meetings stifle public participation.
The first is that the meeting agenda is published late on the preceding Friday. The city staff gets weeks to prepare content. The city council, on the other hand, gets to study like they are cramming for finals over the weekend, and citizens with the wherewithal to download the meeting agenda get even less time. I remember one council meeting where a staffer apologized for a 190-page memo in the study packet provided to the council. How can the public possibly be “informed” with that kind of system?
The other way the voice of the people is cut off is by the “Consent Agenda”. This is where a list of different topics are lumped together and the whole lump either gets approved or denied by the council. Most of the time the subjects are innocuous things like approving meeting minutes, or bills payable to service vendors. However, every once in a while there’s something consequential over which our elected representatives cannot do a down-vote without killing everything. To make it even worse, typically the city council and the public are NOT allowed to comment on these items.
If you’ve ever attended a Hayden City Council meeting and you’ve observed these shortcomings, you want to tear your hair out because it’s so frustrating. The mayor observantly listens to every public comment, and if someone steps over the line to talk about the evening’s agenda items, they’re quickly cut off.
See my comments above. It has to stop. All these procedural steps claim to make government run more efficiently, but they absolutely kill the voice of the people through the process.
When I am elected as Hayden’s next city councilor, I will champion the end of Content Based Restrictions. In addition, I will ask for a minimum of two weeks’ time between release of a meeting’s agenda and study notes to the council and the public before the actual meeting may occur. I will also ask for the end of using a Consent Agenda.
Together, let's bring back the voice of the people in our city government.
- Thomas Shafer
The Hayden Citizen - Opinions
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