I have been speaking at Urbana Human Relations Commission (HRC) meetings for several months now, ever since they decided that the Urbana Human Rights laws don’t apply to the City of Urbana or its employees.

This rather cowardly decision goes against everything written in the Human Rights Ordinance, but commission members were able to justify it by claiming that Human Rights hearings involving a City employee might be uncomfortable and perhaps procedurally complicated.

Unfortunately, this leaves Urbana City employees free to discriminate and retaliate against residents, a practice that has been observed quite frequently in the past few months.

Frances Rigberg, Chair of the Urbana Human Relations Commission, had delivered a number of false statements at the July 8^th HRC meeting, and I sought to correct those statements at their September 9^th meeting.  And so I did.  I was also highly critical of the HRC and their general posture of preferring to ignore internal problems with their own complaint process.

Several hours after the meeting, I received a strange email from Rigberg, telling me that for future meetings, I would need to submit my public input by email, rather than speaking live via Zoom, as I had been.  My exchange with Rigberg, as well as my eventual message to the HRC members (less Rigberg) and the City Council is shown here:

To maximize the irony of the situation, Rigberg’s emails are always signed with a quote born from a book that demonstrates the evils of the government controlling thought and snuffing dissenting speech.

I waited two weeks for a response from the Mayor, the City Council, or anyone else on the Human Relations Commission, but not a single person responded to my query.  Unfortunately, this is the go-to posture of pretty much every public body in Chambana: just ignore the problem, and definitely don’t try to talk about it or recognize that a problem exists.  The best I can figure, Rigberg thought she was simply going to intimidate me or trick me to prevent me from speaking at HRC meetings, but I mostly just have trouble fathoming why an intelligent person would write what she did.

A day after my exchange with Rigberg (shown above), she wrote another email to me with a full copy of the public input options (which is also on every one of the HRC agendas, and has included Zoom participation since the beginning of the pandemic), but then she also said “It looks like the participation instructions on the HRC agendas are out of date” which doesn’t make any sense.  Rigberg has personally taken public input via Zoom half a dozen times before this exchange – she knows the process.  Rigberg then followed up a 2^nd time indicating that I should email my input. 

I did notice that in Rigberg’s follow up, Diane Marlin and Jason Liggett were cc’d.  I have to guess that Rigberg had been inquiring to see if she could prevent people from speaking at HRC meetings.  I also have to guess that this is part of what caused Marlin to go haywire at the September 14^th City Council meeting when she thought she was going to solve all the City’s problems by restricting free speech.

Since I could not fetch any response from anyone at the City on this issue, I decided to simply leave my thoughts here.

-Christopher Hansen, Urbana