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Date: 12/5/2023
NORTHAMPTON — During their Nov. 27 meeting, the Northampton City Council Committee in Legislative Matters sent a few recommendations to the full City Council regarding the rules around public comment after incidents of hate speech occurred at a prior meeting.
The committee sent a few different recommendations back to the full council after City Council President Jim Nash and City Councilor Karen Foster presented some changes to the public comment rules at the beginning of the meeting with hopes of curbing hate speech.
Among the changes Nash and Foster initially proposed were, limiting public comment to items on the agenda for a period of up to two minutes and requiring individuals wishing to speak during public comment to sign up through a link embedded in the agenda at least one hour before the meeting.
They also had language that would permit the presiding officer to limit a commenter’s time if their comment is not relevant to the agenda.
“We were not necessarily anticipating that this is how public comment is handled for the rest of time, but that this is a proposal we had that could help make sure that our council meetings are not a platform for hate speech,” Foster said of the initial changes she and Nash proposed.
Throughout two hours of discussion, councilors and members of the public expressed some trepidation with some of the proposed changes.
“I don’t want to listen to hate speech like that, and I don’t really want anybody to have to hear that, but even more than that, I don’t want to degrade the strength of public participation in city government,” said Northampton resident Amy Martyn. “I would much rather the City Council greatly strengthen the preamble that you read before public comment to strongly voice our values that we hold in this city.”
Florence resident Henry Morgan echoed Martyn’s sentiments.
“What we should be trying to do is open up the doors of our democracy to people rather than to close it … and we do that, we’ll build up a really strong culture of civic engagement,” Morgan said.
After the discussion, the committee, including Nash, unanimously decided to not recommend that the council limit public comment to items on the agenda.
“I stand strongly behind the freedom of expression that people have during our public comment period,” said City Councilor Alex Jarrett, who also chairs Legislative Matters. “I’d be very wary of adding the restriction to matters only on the agenda because I think that can be subverted fairly easily.”
Moulton also felt that limiting public comment to items on the agenda would not be beneficial.
“I don’t think it’s going to be effective at eliminating hate speech,” Moulton said.
The committee also recommended that a sign-up sheet be required for public comment participants over Zoom and in-person, but with a 3-1 vote, the committee recommended that in-person and Zoom participants have until the start of the meeting to sign up for public comment. Zoom participants would use the embedded link in the agenda to sign up while in-person participants would sign up at the podium.
Concurrently, the committee is recommending that only those who signed up before or at the start of the meeting are allowed to provide public comment.
Jarrett provided the lone “no” vote for the sign-up sheet recommendations since he disagreed with having a sign-up sheet altogether.
He argued that people usually get inspired to speak during public comment when others before them do, and by requiring a sign-up sheet before the meeting, the council would eliminate the possibility of those who did not sign up, but were inspired by a speaker before them, to speak.
City Councilor Marissa Elkins, also a member of the committee, stated that she was in favor of a sign-up sheet until the meeting starts and also spoke against the idea of limiting public comment to items only present on the agenda.
“I think we should stay away from that,” Elkins said, regarding the public comment limit language.
The committee’s discussion on Nov. 27 was sparked by incidents at the Nov. 2 regular City Council hybrid meeting where a group of “Zoom bombers” used their allotted two minutes for public comment to spew offensive comments.
During that particular public comment session, several people over Zoom used fake names and kept their cameras off while making racist and antisemitic remarks.
The City Council eventually took a 10-minute break to regroup and determine the course of action in response to the comments. When they returned to the meeting, the council decided to suspend the remainder of the public comment session.
“I think we handled things as best we could then,” said City Council President Jim Nash, during a Nov. 9 special follow-up meeting. “We were all here for each other…and here this week, we need to consider a way forward.”
The full City Council conducted the Nov. 9 special meeting to address possible changes to the public comment rules in response to the hate speech before eventually tasking the Legislative Matters committee with parsing any proposed changes.
The full council will discuss Legislative Matters’ recommendations at a future City Council meeting. Reminder Publishing will have more on this issue.
Readers can also read prior coverage of City Council’s discussion around hate speech from a prior edition: http://archives.thereminder.com/localnews/northampton/northampton-city-council-reviews-public-comment-af/.