Cypress officials are looking to ban employees from speaking to reporters on behalf of the city without approval from the city manager, making them the latest elected leaders in Orange County to tackle who exactly gets to be the voice of local government.
On Monday, Cypress City Council members directed the city manager and city attorney to amend a proposed media policy dictating how city staff should handle inquiries from reporters.
“This is a topic that all cities experience, especially cities during very tragic times,” said Mayor Leo Medrano. “This is a very complicated situation. Different times you want a different spokesperson, depending upon what the emergency is.”
The move would make the top administrator the primary spokesperson for the city responsible for addressing and delegating most media calls, as officials on Monday night approved an agreement for the next city manager, Shannon DeLong, who starts at the end of next month.
It comes almost a year after former city department director Doug Dancs publicly made unspecified misconduct allegations against the former City Manager Peter Grant, who ultimately resigned in August.
Since then, officials adopted an ordinance last fall that prohibits city council members from disparaging each other from the dais – sparking first amendment concerns in a city where elected leaders have publicly hurled their own allegations against each other in the past.
[Read: Hold Your Tongue: Cypress Bans Politicians From Disparaging Each Other at City Council Meetings]
Genesis of a Media Policy: Who Can Speak to The Press?
In an interview before the meeting, City Councilman David Burke said he had called for clarification on who speaks for the city and how the city drops news releases.
Burke pointed to a statement before his tenure in response to the voting rights lawsuit the city faced and said he was never able to get an answer on who wrote it.
“I just want some clarity regarding who makes statements on behalf of the city and I also wanted residents to be able to know if a statement came out, who wrote that statement,” he later said at the meeting.
“I won’t go into details, but essentially, it was hard for even me as a council member to get answers as to where statements came from.”
Sean Joyce, the interim city manager, said in an email before the meeting the proposed policy was part of the council’s strategic objectives and that many public agencies have their own media policies but didn’t name which ones.
“Cypress, and virtually every municipal organization, have a plethora of policies intended to provide clarity to staff operating under a variety of circumstances. An important operational tenet to which we aspire is to provide timely and accurate information to the public—either directly or through media outlets,” he wrote.
“Establishing clear guidelines strengthens our ability to effectively communicate in an accurate and timely way to our constituents through a variety of communications channels and platforms, including the media.”
David Loy, Legal Director for the First Amendment Coalition, said the city is entitled to choose who speaks on their behalf but it would be a problem if officials tried to ban elected leaders or staff from speaking to the media at all about the city.
“I don’t think it violates the letter of First Amendment case law as long as it’s clear – both on paper and in practice –that elected officials and staff remain free to talk with the media or with anyone, as long as they’re clear that they speak for themselves and not the city,” he said in a Monday phone interview.
The policy would still allow staff to share their own personal viewpoints with journalists as private citizens.
Still, Loy said the policy could have a chilling effect.
“My concern would be if it’s over interpreted and people take it as a chilling effect on their ability to speak at all but if the city is clear that there’s no consequences or repercussions for talking to the press in your own in your own name, then it’s hard to say that a court would find that it violates the First Amendment,” he said.
Burke said the policy isn’t meant to silence anyone.
“The intent of the policy is not to prevent anyone from speaking their mind or anything of that nature so I think we’ll try and make efforts to ensure that it doesn’t do that as we work through it,” he said in a phone interview.
It is unclear exactly what the consequences – if any – there would be for violating the policy.
Joyce said the proposed policy wasn’t meant to be enforced as much as it was meant to be implemented and also said the policy wasn’t intended to silence city staff.
“Employees will know that they should consult with the city manager before speaking on behalf of the city. There is no intention of ‘weaponizing’ a policy aimed at providing accurate information to the media,” he wrote in his email.
“Again, the policy does not suggest that only the city manager can address issues. Rather, it establishes that the city manager should be consulted before responding to media inquiries.”
Councilman Kyle Chang said in a Tuesday email that he viewed the policy more as guideline than rules.
The rest of the city council did not respond to requests for comment ahead of the Monday meeting.
Proposed Media Policy in Cypress
The proposed policy states the mayor will be the official spokesperson for the city council on city policies and warns elected officials to be cautious about what they say to members of the press and assume they are always “on the record.”
City staff clarified at the meeting elected officials would still be allowed to speak with reporters under the proposed policy as long as they clarified it was their own viewpoint.
Burke said council members having to repeat they are sharing their personal opinion in an interview seemed redundant and that the policy should make it explicitly clear council members are free to speak to the press.
He added that the mayor should also be free to make a statement on the city’s social media pages about current events.
Chang said he liked the idea of elected officials having to clarify in interviews that they are sharing their own opinion, not the official position of the city.
“It might just be, in general, a good practice for us to do, but I would like to see that, especially when it comes to controversial issues,” he said at the meeting.
Councilwoman Bonnie Peat said the city manager runs the day to day business of Cypress and should handle official statements.
“If there’s a personal opinion that the mayor feels like they want to put something out,” she said. “They put it on their own Facebook page.”
Under the proposed policy, the city manager would also have final say over all news releases the city puts out under the new media rules, all questions from reporters must go through them and will have the power to delegate who from city staff can respond.
Employees would be required to send all press inquiries to the city manager by e-mail, providing information about the request, the name of the reporter and the news outlet, the reporter’s phone number and when the story is expected to be published or broadcasted.
The policy also states the city’s police chief and a representative from OC Fire Authority may handle routine media inquiries related to public safety issues without getting approval from the city manager
City employees would be allowed to provide “inconsequential” information to journalists like providing information about a city event’s location or a meeting starting time under the rules.
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org.