Public Comments Debated by Council

Image: Mayor Nathan Triplett and Councilmembers Kathy Boyle and Susan Woods at Council last night

Around midnight, about five hours into last night’s East Lansing City Council meeting, a debate broke out about how to manage public comments at these meetings.

Councilmember Susan Woods said she had asked City staff to look into options for how to let citizens know they are about to exceed or have exceeded the five minutes to which Council asks people to limit their comments at these meetings. She indicated she was motivated by public comments offered by Roy Saper (East Lansing resident and owner of Saper Galleries), who has repeatedly appeared at Council to object to the closing of the Bailey daycare. Saper, Woods noted, has gone over five minutes.

As a consequence of Woods’ request, the City manager produced a memo for Council reporting that they had identified a timer-with-lights technological device costing $857. This device would indicate with bright lights when a speaker is about to time out. The light would turn red when the speaker was over her or his allotted time. Currently the mayor simply advises people when they reach five minutes. This verbal notification system has been used for many years.

Councilmember Ruth Beier immediately and strongly objected to use of the device, with Mayor Pro Tem Diane Goddeeris joining her later in the debate. Beier told her colleagues, “Sometimes someone has something very important to say that I want to hear, and I don’t want them to be intimidated by a light or a timer.”

While Beier agreed that “it is a pain in the ass to stay here until midnight," she said “it doesn’t happen very often.” She added that she thought that staying late was “nothing like the cost of squelching or intimidating public comment.” She called the timer a “ridiculously bad idea.”

Woods said she was “totally for this” device because “it’s not like they’re going to fall through the floor if they don’t stop talking” when the light goes on. When pressed by Beier on why, then, Woods wants the timer, Woods replied, “I think people just want to hear themselves talk.”

Beier answered, “I think that is very insulting.”

Councilmember Kathy Boyle initially supported use of the device. She quoted me saying, as I had five hours earlier during public comments, that it has been excruciating and draining listening to people’s pain during the last week. (I objected from the audience, out of order, to Boyle likening her job on Council to my work for ELi. I was duly shushed by several members of Council.)

Boyle said speakers are often repetitive. She said that special presentations by citizens might be given more time than five minutes, but for the average speaker, the device was a good idea. She said she had to sometimes be subject to time limits as a lawyer in court.

Mayor Nathan Triplett said he wanted guidance on what to do since he was the one, as mayor, who would have to warn speakers. He agreed with Woods that Saper’s remarks were an example of comments that went over time.

Woods said she counted four people in the Bailey discussion—just before the vote to close the daycare and community center occurred—who went 7-10 minutes in their remarks. She said she thought the device would make people be “more succinct and clearer and not repetitive.”

Beier responded, “It’s not like we don’t repeat ourselves all the time. Developers stand up there and repeat themselves all the time. It’s sometimes irritating and boring,” but, she said, “that’s government.”

City Manager George Lahanas said that the problem with people speaking too long is that citizens leave the meeting and miss important business. Triplett said that there were “complaints” about not sticking to the schedule.

The schedule last night was not one to which the public, staff, or Council stuck. The published agenda for last night’s meeting estimated the meeting would end at 10:55 pm, and it went an hour and a half longer, ending at 12:27 am. Council was almost immediately running late on their agenda because the agenda allowed three minutes in total for public comments at the start of the meeting, and public comments went about 25 minutes. (It is common for Council to allow only three minutes for public comments on their agendas.)

Last night, many of the staff reports also went longer than planned, and Council spent more time than budgeted discussing PDIG’s development proposal, a possible charter amendment over land sales, and other matters. The discussion of this timer device also went well over the time allotted to it.

Observed Boyle during the discussion, “It would be nice if we could let everyone police themselves but I don’t think that’s been successful for us. I’m open to other ideas,” like the device.

But Goddeeris said she did not want to cut anyone off or open the door “to picking and choosing who we let go on.” She said she agreed with Beier that the device was a bad idea. She said it would be good to tell people with letters to summarize the letters if they would take more than five minutes to read and to enter the letters into the record.

Goddeeris told Council that when people came to Council to speak, “having someone cut you off is hard.” She said, “If I have to stay here until one in the morning, that is what I will do,” and concluded, “It’s just the way of democracy.”

During my public comment, besides remarking on the feedback I was hearing from Council’s recent decisions, I noted that at Council meetings developers are given unlimited time, are invited to interact in dialogue with Council, and are allowed to use PowerPoint, because they are recognized as having “business before Council,” but the public is not given any of these accommodations at the average meeting (even if they represent whole neighborhoods). I suggested that instead of spending $857 on this “game show” device, Council spend $450 on a GoPro camera so that they could video record Council work sessions and upload them to YouTube so that people would not have to rely on my reports of what’s happened at Council.

The City Manager later said they didn’t let citizens use PowerPoint because they might put up something “inappropriate.”

At the meeting, Council did endorse the City Manager’s plan to spend $2500 per year to audio record Council’s work sessions and make the audio recordings available on the City website. He said that when they put up the recordings, they will include all work sessions from this year, including those that have already occurred, as they’ve already been recording them.

Susan Woods, who is Director of the East Lansing Film Festival, endorsed the idea of using professionals for the audio recordings (as is the plan) and said it was a very good price.

Bailey resident and Planning Commission member Erik Altmann asked me this morning if Council had voted in favor of the device. Told no, and asked for his comment on the matter, he replied, “City Council destroys a daycare program and mothballs a community center, then wants to spend $857 on a high-end egg-timer to cut people off if they complain too long at Council meetings. Part of me really hopes they do this.”

They did not, but decided they may revisit the matter in the future.