Huntington Beach city officials agreed to remove previous restrictions placed on public commenters after the ACLU sent a letter accusing Mayor Pat Burns of violating the state’s open meeting law, known as the Brown Act.
During a council meeting on May 6, Burns implemented several rules during the public comment portion of the meeting, including preventing residents from cursing or speaking directly to individual council members.
He told residents to address the council as a whole and interrupted speakers who referred to individual council members by name during their comments.
“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 said that speakers who willfully disturb or break up a meeting may be guilty of a misdemeanor before public comment started.
“If it is determined that your behavior is disruptive to the council conducting city business, police are prepared to escort you out, and you may be arrested,” he said.
The Brown Act lays out protections for members of the public to speak at meetings.
The open meeting law does allow speakers to be silenced if they’re disrupting a public meeting, but ACLU staff attorney Jonathan Markovitz argued Burns had no legitimate basis for preventing speech targeting specific council members.
“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,’” Markovitz wrote in a May 22 letter.
Markovitz argued that controlling residents’ comments is not okay unless speakers are making so much of a disruption that a meeting cannot continue.
“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,” he wrote.
[Read: Huntington Beach Leaders Called Out For Improperly Cutting Off Public Commenters]
During Tuesday’s meeting, the council voted 6-0 to “cease, desist from, and not repeat the challenged past action” described in the ACLU letter — without admitting violation of the Brown Act.
The item was approved at the very end of the meeting without any council discussion. Councilmember Andrew Gruel, who was appointed in March, was absent from the meeting.
[Read: Huntington Beach Appoints Andrew Gruel to City Council]
The ACLU letter was sent on behalf of Wendy Rincon, one of the speakers who was interrupted during her comment on May 6 and asked to address the council as a whole instead of speaking to individual council members.
“Mayor Pat Burns violated my First Amendment rights and the Brown Act when he shut me down during public comment simply because he didn’t like that I was directing comments to Chad Williams and to Don Kennedy in my speech,” she said at Tuesday’s meeting.
“Let me be clear: it is not illegal to criticize elected officials. What is illegal is silencing dissent, violating open meeting laws and suppressing speech in a public forum,” Rincon said.
During Tuesday’s meeting, multiple speakers addressed specific council members by name, and their comments went uninterrupted.
Rincon said people should be allowed to individually address elected officials.
“I ask the council to take this warning seriously and ensure that every resident, regardless of viewpoint, is allowed to speak without unlawful interference.”
Angelina Hicks is the Voice of OC Collegiate News Service Editor. Contact her at ahicks@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @angelinahicks13.