Council member Bill Brown expressed his support for Urbana’s new speech restrictions at the October 12th City Council meeting. The past president, and current steering committee member, of the Champaign County ACLU also said that the speech restrictions would be applied differently by different presiding officers.
Urbana’s content-based speech restrictions are already concerning, but discriminatory application of the rules would only seem to aggravate the situation. Though it was somewhat unclear, it seemed as though Mr. Brown may have even been touting non-uniform application of the rules as a feature.
Brown then described various hypotheticals wherein the presiding officer of a meeting, and the other members of the public body, may engage in a debate about whether or not to mute a speaker. He said that Council members could call a point of order, and potentially vote on the decision to mute a speaker. Presumably, all of this would take place in the middle of a speaker’s commentary.
Check CU is not aware of any other public body in Illinois that has expressed an interest or action in such byzantine mechanisms by which to limit the content of speech of the public at open meetings. Such content-based limitations, and especially discriminatory application of public speaking rules, would seem to be an obvious violation of the Illinois Open Meetings Act.
Part of Brown’s statement at the October 12th Urbana City Council meeting can be viewed here: