Dozens of residents who turned out to speak at the Graham city council meeting on February 10 were, no doubt, deeply disappointed that the council ignored their pleas to keep and fix the existing Sesquicentennial Park. Instead, last week, during a special meeting, the council voted, 3-2, to move the park around the corner to a less visible parking lot site, eliminating about 20 downtown parking spaces in the process.
But lest the advocates for the park think their messages – delivered during one hour and 22 minutes of public comments that night – didn’t have any impact on the council, we suspect they will be equally dismayed and disappointed by the “lesson” the city council apparently took from such a broad turnout of citizens.
During another “special” meeting this week – ostensibly to deal with its meeting procedures and to hear from a financial consultant – the council set about to institute two new restrictions so that the council will never again have to suffer through such lengthy expressions of citizen input, on any topic.
At the behest of council member Bonnie Whitaker, the council moved toward halving the amount of time public speakers may use (from four minutes down to two) and setting a maximum cumulative allotment of 30 minutes for all public comments.
When the time clock hits 30 minutes, residents and other would-be speakers are just out of luck.
While it is true that the county commissioners limit public comments to 30 minutes at their meetings – part of the parallel justification Whitaker tried to use to warrant a crackdown on speakers in Graham – the commissioners meet twice a month, Graham’s city council only once.
Whitaker and other council members seemed intent on also halving the amount of time any individual citizen could speak – to just two minutes. (Whitaker inaccurately claimed that’s the same time limit as commissioners impose, but it’s not; three minutes is the standard there, and almost everywhere else.)
No other local jurisdiction has such a narrow time frame. Most allow three minutes, Burlington’s city council allows as much as five.
The institution of both time limits (individual and cumulative) is clearly aimed at the Sesquicentennial Park issue inasmuch as no other issue has generated such an outpouring of public comments in years.
The only silver lining we can see in the council’s scheme is a narrow (3-2) preference for moving up public comments to near the beginning of the meeting, rather than at the end, as currently.
Citizens who want to speak their mind could do so and then leave, if they so desire, based on the discussion this week.
Councilman Bobby Chin thinks everything the council wants to discuss is more important than anything its citizens might want to bring forward; therefore, citizens should wait, he insisted (joined by Hall) until the council has otherwise finished its agenda items.
Most other local councils allow public comments toward the beginning of their meetings. Only Graham makes them wait until the very end.
The council’s mini-dictators also set about an interesting Catch-22.
Chin, who has made no secret of his disdain for the Sesquicentennial Park advocates, wants to prohibit speakers from addressing a topic that’s on the council’s monthly agendas during their public comments.
(Of course, never mind that the council can’t really prohibit, or restrict, the topics any citizen wants to address during their time at the podium.)
In many cases – including the January 13 and February 10 city council meetings when two different park relocation plans were unveiled – the council wouldn’t allow citizens to speak when that agenda item came up.
So Chin would, effectively, ban them from addressing an item on the agenda – even while simultaneously banning them from speaking on the agenda item when it comes up.
Frankly, some of the council members’ comments this week dripped of both an arrogance and contempt toward the residents they ostensibly serve.
Oh, here’s another ironic element of the council’s deliberations this week. They want the mayor to enforce some sense of civility among speakers who address the council. So, pray tell, who’s to enforce any semblance of civility among council members toward their constituents for whom they continue to demonstrate such haughtiness and condescension.
(And, just by the way, the courts of North Carolina have recently issued a decision that reinforces that speakers at public meetings may not be curtailed based on the content, or even lack of charity, in their comments.)
And while we’re used to hearing Whitaker and Chin harangue over disliking the public and their comments, we are somewhat surprised that this week’s discussion about curtailing public participation did not appear to spur any dissent from more reasonable members of the council – mayor pro tem Ricky Hall who has recently aligned with the anti-park contingent, newcomer Jim Young, or the city’s new mayor Chelsea Dickey.
Hall, when he was planning board chairman, was always very welcoming of public comments in that context, so we’re surprised to find him joining the Whitaker-Chin bandwagon of proposing to curb public participation.
Citizens who have an opinion on any subject probably better turn out at the council’s next meeting, on March 10, to speak during the public comment period – while they still can.
