The Urbana City Council finally passed the speech restrictions that Mayor Marlin has been pushing for the past month. Marlin first violated the recorded public input rules of the City Council on September 14th (article here), when she arbitrarily reduced speaking times and interrupted and muted members of the public who made comments she disliked.
Realizing, perhaps, that she had very clearly violated the Open Meetings Act on September 14th, Marlin quickly presented an ordinance outlining her new rules at the September 21st Committee of the Whole meeting. That ordinance did not leave the Committee, but Marlin tried again on October 5th with a different variation of the ordinance, and that version was sent forward to the October 12th City Council meeting where it was just passed, with minor modifications.
The new meeting rules ordinance only apply to virtual meetings, and the original meeting rules for physical meetings remain intact. The Council did not contemplate how hybrid meeting formats would be handled.
The new meeting rules for virtual meetings allow members of the public to speak for 4 minutes each, up to a total of 1 hour (the physical meeting rules allow for 5 minutes and 2 hours). The new rules provide for a number of different content-based speech restrictions on language that is “abusive, harassing, threatening, or defamatory”. However, the ordinance does not attempt to define any of these words. The ordinance indicates that a presiding officer can interrupt a speaker with warnings and mute them.
Just because the Council formally changed the public input rules for City meetings, that doesn’t make their speech restrictions legal. The Illinois Open Meetings Act gives any person the right to address public bodies during meetings, and the Illinois Attorney General (IAG) has held that the only restrictions that can be made are time, place, and manner restrictions. Muting someone simply because you don’t like what they’re saying, or because they’re not speaking about a specific agenda item, is a content-based restriction. The IAG has made it very clear that content-based restrictions are not allowed.
The situation would appear to be a ticking time bomb for the City and for Mayor Marlin. Restricting speech has never been a tenable method for democracies to product good results and happy civilians. The upcoming Urbana meetings should be interesting, as they will show exactly how Marlin and others intend to apply these rules.
The following Council members voted to pass the new rules:
- Bill Brown
- William Colbrook
- Dennis Roberts
- Maryalice Wu
Jared Miller voted against the new ordinance, and Shirese Hursey and Julie Laut were absent, but both indicated in letters that they support the new rules.
-Christopher Hansen, Urbana
A snipped of the virtual meeting rules has been added below. Click to see the full pdf.
