It's time to reform Public Comment
The 19-hour meeting isn't accomplishing anything . . . for anyone
You’ve seen the videos. School board meetings being hijacked by angry protesters, shouting down the public officials.
Luckily, we don’t have that in San Francisco.
That’s because we put shouting-at-public-officials right on the agenda.
It’s called Public Comment.
If you’ve spent more than a minute observing local politics, you are well aware of what public comment is like.
It can be kooks or cranks, off on a tangent. You’ll remember Walter Paulson, who sang versions of popular songs with a political twist during Public Comment at the Board of Supervisors.
Or, more likely, passionate advocates who stand in line for hours to get to the microphone and deliver the one universal truth that everyone should understand.
Public Comment is why SF school board meetings routinely run past midnight. It is why some Board of Supervisors meetings drone on for hours and hours. It is why committee meeting rooms in City Hall are sometimes packed with spectators — with a spillover room for extra seating if the issue is especially contentious.
And there’s nothing wrong with the concept. The right to Public Comment became law under the Ralph M. Brown Act in 1953. It guarantees the public’s right “to attend and participate in” legislative meetings.
Of course, here “participating” has been stretched out into mind-numbing testimonials, over and over.
It’s not any one ethnic or cultural group who does it. When the School Board was discussing changing the standards for admission into Lowell High School, hundreds of parents lined up to speak.
Advocacy groups and neighborhood collectives have Public Comment down to an art. A group like the Coalition on Homelessness can marshall a parade of public commenters until it sounds like everyone in the city is supporting their views.
And yes, this goes way back in San Francisco. Back in 1970, Tom Wolfe’s wrote “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers.” (Now there’s a title that hasn’t aged well.)
The “Flack Catchers” part is a description of a scene in San Francisco’s City Hall. A group of Black and Samoan radicals go to offices of city officials and angrily and successfully push them to support their programs.
So forcefully confronting city officials in public is nothing new. In some ways a cynic would say that’s how SF politics work.
But this story in the SF Standard, by Jane Notoli and Lee Cooperband, got me thinking.
Their point, and they use the chaotic Redistricting Task Force as the example, is that the onslaught of Public Commenters should be seen more as a “distributed denial of service attack.”
It is, they say, like computer bots who overwhelm a website with angry comments.
I think that’s an important point. At the Redistricting Task Force meeting, we’re pretty clear on the issues. A group of African-American residents are objecting to the way the Task Force has drawn the map. They feel it will disenfranchise them.
Asian-American groups feel the same way.
Fair enough, those concerns are on record.
But that’s the problem with the process. It isn’t making the point. It’s the browbeating.
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The meeting of the Task Force on April 9 lasted 19 hours. Speaker after speaker rose to make the same points again and again. The same people got up to speak, again and again. And gradually it became more personal and insulting.
Here’s one of the frequent Public Commenters, telling commission members they are “full of shit.” And then telling Asian speakers that it is “disrespectful” of them to use translators, if they can speak English.
And then watch this Asian man, angrily pushing back against the advocates.
Uh guys . . . remember the map? The reason everyone is here?
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Who is there who thinks this has been a useful process? At the end of the day a map was not approved, law suits have been threatened and the debate has descended into some pretty ugly racial sniping.
I don’t think it is a radical idea to say public commenting needs changing.
And as I was considering that, Tenderloin activist and director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, Randy Shaw, laid out some very smart suggestions. So I’m going to echo/steal those thoughts.
First, he says, limit speakers to one minute. I agree, and when they try to blow past the time, cut the mic. You can make your point in 60 seconds.
Second, limit comment to “once, per person, per subject.” Once a commenter has made his/her point, that’s enough. We’ve seen people get up, meeting after meeting, and repeat the same points, almost word-for-word. That’s how you get a 19-hour meeting.
And finally, most controversially, Shaw recommends limiting the amount of time for Public Comment. He notes that the California legislature often limits comment to 30 minutes.
That’s probably not enough time, but an hour — or even two hours — would be a huge improvement. And it would surely provide enough time for everybody to make their case . . . once.
You’d probably say that will be hard to enforce, but I don’t think so.
I’d put Public Comment at the end of the meeting. And I’d announce, repeatedly, that the time will be strictly limited.
And then, when that time was reached, I’d say, “Thank you. The meeting is adjourned.”
And the officials would get up and leave.
Because you can’t have Public Comment without an audience.
Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Compliments and suggestions welcome. Criticism not so much. Twitter: @cwnevius
Thanks for this. I'd like to think I'm relatively dialed into local politics but I guess I still had no awareness of how these meetings were actually reaching the long durations I'd read about.