During regular public input at the beginning of the meeting several citizens spoke out about moving public input, including myself.
It was the last agenda item on the meeting and during that discussion they voted to move it to the end but did take Barth’s amendment to leave it at 5 minutes instead of 3. He was the dissenting vote.
I reminded the MCC that this was the public’s time and the word DISSENT is in the 1st Amendment.
Republicans no longer believe in democracy.
“Republicans are idiots who think ‘democracy’ is a word created by the Democratic Party”….
IF the people so do not support this move, they have 20 or 30 days to ‘refer’ the ordinance change to a public vote. If not, they passively accept the decision/rule.
Public Meetings are the peoples business, however, ‘free speech’ can be restricted within the confines of the meeting based on how the people wish to govern their public meetings.
IT does not matter where in a public meeting you place a “public commentary period”, by law, there must be a time set aside.
The UK has an unwritten constitution. Freedom of speech in the UK could theoretically be ended by just one vote in the House of Commons. Now, the Houses of Lords could delay that reality, which would be ironic, but it only takes a single vote in the Commons to end it. That’s why it’s incumbent in any democracy, unwritten or written, for political leaders to understand the vulnerabilities of a given political system and not abuse or use it, but rather protect it. Because, if our local political leaders really cared about democracy in the classic Norman Rockwell sense, then they would protect and enhance public input and not slowly kill it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Speech_(painting)
Isn’t this why we vote for commissioners. Your public input is voting and meeting them on the campaign trail or campaigning against them. I know how much time you have to split hairs about a 5 minute public input time but if you really believe so strongly that you are the righteous one here then run for government and see if you get the votes. I can tell you what will happen. You will lose. You know this, but you still have an opinion and love to waste other people’s time and hey I guess that’s why we have the first amendment. You live in a fantasy land.
Your interaction with elected officials doesn’t end the day after the election, and unfortunately, many people like yourself feel that way.
Conservatives always talk about local control. I guess what that really means is that they want to control it locally and only them. And here I thought it meant they wanted the citizenry to be involved. #SillyMe
Also, local government should be like a Kool Aid stand where it should be expected that you can converse with its owner, while upper government, especially at the federal level, should be seen as more national, representative, and hands off like going to Walmart and not expecting to see and talk to its CEO. (I just thought the business analogy might be more appreciated by our Republican leaders. 🙂 )
( and Woodstock adds: “Say, I once wore a pair of Converses to a congressional hearing and got kicked out”… #ChuckTaylorNation! )