Huntington Beach residents have been empowered to speak up after the ACLU sent a demand letter calling out Mayor Pat Burns for cutting off commenters who cursed or tried to address individual council members in front of the city. 

Since taking over as mayor in December, Burns has repeatedly faced a packed city hall every other Tuesday night, with dozens of commenters looking to weigh in on controversial issues like the future of the city’s library review board and the city’s budget struggles. 

Burns did not respond to requests for comment on this article. 

On the night city leaders appointed Andrew Gruel to the council, they had to clear the room over the protests, and he has routinely opted to cut speaking time down to a minute and a half per person to get through the crowd.  

[Read: Huntington Beach Appoints Andrew Gruel to City Council]

That’s allowed under the Brown Act, California’s open meeting law, which lays out many protections over residents’ ability to speak up at city council meetings. 

But Burns also implemented several other rules, including barring residents from speaking directly to individual council members. 

“Should you have cause or want to directly address a council member one on one, don’t do it from the podium,” Burns said at the council’s May 6 meeting. “We’re one council up here, address the council as a whole.” 

He also warned that people could be charged with misdemeanors for interfering with the meeting by cursing or shouting from the audience, and when booed said “Yeah, keep going.” 

“It got so bad at three previous meetings we had to recess and ask the public to leave,” Burns reminded over 80 residents at the council’s May 6 meeting. “I’m advising the public that disruptive behavior that leads to disturbing or breaking up the meeting will not be tolerated.” 

That same night, Burns silenced at least two speakers after they referred to city council members by name, something the ACLU of Southern California argues he’s not allowed to do under the Brown Act unless they’re disrupting the meeting. 

“The Mayor had no legitimate basis for preventing these speakers from providing their public comments, and he certainly had no legitimate basis for indicating that their speech was in any way “disruptive,” wrote Jonathan Markovitz, one of the ACLU’s staff attorneys, in a May 22 letter. 

It’s a decision HB City Attorney Mike Vigliotta agreed with, telling Burns that he had to let commenters address who they wanted to. 

“You should just address the Council, but to the extent they need to mention names, they can,” said Vigliotta – appointed by the council after former elected City Attorney Michael Gates left office to join the Trump Administration – at that meeting. 

[Read: Huntington Beach City Attorney Heads to Trump Administration]

Markovitz also argued that unless the residents were making so much of a disruption the meeting could not continue, warning them to control their comments was not ok. 

“Warning members of the public that they may be removed from a meeting or even arrested and prosecuted for conduct that does not begin to rise to this level impermissibly chills their rights to address their elected officials.”

Now, city staff are asking city council members to stop cutting off commenters on those issues, while also not admitting they violated the Brown Act by interrupting them. 

“The City of Huntington Beach hereby unconditionally commits that it will cease, desist from, and not repeat the challenged past action as described in the letter from the ACLU,” reads a city staff report outlining the issue for consideration at Tuesday night’s city council meeting. . 

The report also notes that includes not telling members of the public to avoid “foul language,” or “crude gestures,” while speaking, not to silence people who do those things and that people can engage in “whistling, clapping, stomping of feet, repeated waving of arms,” without it being automatically labeled disruptive. 

Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.