On Saturday morning, Mayor Marlin sent out an email to the Urbana City Council and City of Urbana Department heads describing a plan to regulate speech during public input at meetings of public bodies.
The relevant portion of the email is shown below, and if you click on the image you can see the entire email in pdf format.
Marlin is wrong, by the way. A public body cannot bar “defamatory language” because doing so would violate an individual’s right to due process. I’m not sure that “abusive” language even has a legal definition, and “threatening” appears to refer to “political threats”, which is very unclear. Certainly, if people were making threats of bodily harm (and I’m not aware that anyone ever has), that would be an issue.
The only “political threats” I’ve heard anyone make at a council meeting were something along the lines of “we’re not going to reelect you”. Although I find such a threat to be somewhat of a waste of breath, it certainly doesn’t cross any lines that would allow the Mayor to bar them from speaking. It seems that Marlin must have gotten some really bad advice from the City Attorney, James Simon, who seems to have no qualms about regularly peddling nonsense as legal knowledge.
Allowances for public input at Urbana Council meetings were already quite problematic. The Mayor would frequently limit speakers to 3 minutes instead of the 5 minutes allotted in the City Code. There were also several meetings where the agenda clearly stated that emailed public input would be read aloud, and Marlin decided to simply skip that step, leaving many people unheard. Promises of making emailed public input available to everyone online have been broken in virtually every instance.
Marlin seems to think that the best mechanism to deal with upset and disenfranchised residents is to find new ways to silence them. She fails to realize that the reason people are becoming more forceful in their speech is that they feel that they aren’t being heard, and that their government is only being responsive to the extent that they can alter the narrative, rather than by fundamentally altering how we do business in Urbana.
“Alter the narrative” is simply a polite way of saying that the Mayor and her staff frequently tell lies about issues brought forth by the public. The public is smarter than the Urbana City Government gives them credit for, and the deceptions are readily noticed and called out by the public.
I have described, more than once in the past few months, this phenomenon of a “nasty feedback mechanism” that the City of Urbana currently has with its residents. They primary driver is the absolute refusal by our officials and city staff to recognize and take responsibility for misconduct. Every effort is made toward altering the narrative and/or covering up misconduct. The people (including myself, of course) sense this and they return every week with more and louder grievances. The City attempts to spin a new web of deception and we repeat the process, always adding magnitude to the perturbation. This cycle can easily be stopped by engaging in actual honest conversations.
On the contrary, as a cure, the Mayor means to restrict the ability of civilians to issue protest against government impropriety. As with almost any attempt to restrict free speech, unless Marlin happens to have a murderous army that will carry out her orders, it simply won’t work. Not allowing residents to speak their hearts out will only exacerbate tensions, and people will become even more frustrated and angry.
I have contemplated that this outcome may actually be part of the plan. If Marlin and city staff can throw enough fuel on the fire, they may find for themselves an opportunity to play victim and garner sympathy, just in time for Marlin’s reelection campaign.
Unfortunately, whatever the sinister plan may be, this is nothing but destructive toward the goal of shaking out and actually fixing the problems in our local government. This is exactly why we have laws like the Open Meetings Act, which forbids such dictatorial postures and guarantees the public the right to speak at meetings.
The Mayor is right about one thing: Urbana needs to get things done. There are many problems that need solving, and all of those problems are going to be better solved with the help and guidance of the residents of Urbana. This is why Marlin needs to immediately drop this censorship strategy and pull a 180: end the game of simply trying to twist the narrative, and instead embrace accountability, and shoulder responsibility. This is what leaders do.
Christopher Hansen, Urbana