An Arroyo Grande City Council meeting descended into chaos during public comment after multiple community members — and a mayoral hopeful — overstepped the council’s newly instituted public comment rules Tuesday evening.
At the first meeting since Aug. 13 in which the City Council moved to shorten public comment from three minutes to one minute for items not on the agenda, citizens turned out to show their displeasure with the new rules.
Mayoral candidate Gaea Powell was among the more prominent faces in attendance and used her time to voice displeasure with the council’s new comment rules. She was joined by around 20 people similarly upset with the rule change.
Taking the microphone during general public comment, Powell said she wouldn’t comply with the council’s new rules, getting a warning from Mayor Caren Ray Russom as she pushed through a speech laden with anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
“I don’t need a warning — this is a public forum,” Powell told Ray Russom after she received a second warning during her comment. “No matter what you guys say, the Constitution protects me.”
Council calls recess as residents overstep new comment rules
City attorney Isaac Rosen said the City Council reserves the right to make changes to the length of time members of the public have to comment on city issues, though the Brown Act requires the public to have a “reasonable” time, place and manner to comment.
He also said the City Council meeting is a “designated limited public forum,” meaning while people may express their thoughts about the topic at hand, they are not permitted to use the time to grandstand about issues not included on the agenda.
Former Arroyo Grande resident Pamela Storton said her old high school government teacher at Arroyo Grande High would be “turning in his grave” if he saw the reduction in public comment time.
“When did this change? When did representative democracy change to a corporation?” Storton asked. “Please, give me those dates, times and how it happened.”
Ray Russom twice called the meeting to recess during the public comment period, first for five minutes and then for 10 minutes.
Multiple commenters including Powell used their minute to express their complaints about the new comment system and turned to spreading anti-LGBTQ messaging once their time had elapsed, voicing concerns about children being exposed to lewd, p*rnographic or LGBTQ-related content in school.
“Great harm and abuse is being perpetrated on the children in our community, yet our elected lead elected officials remain sightless to support the abuse, or support the abuse to distract the public from learning the details of this unimaginable reality,” Powell told the assembled audience. “Their official strategy is to villainize and censor those like myself and others who are trying to sound the alarm about this abuse.”
After the council vacated the chamber for the second time for a 10-minute recess, Powell and supporters took the stand and continued to speak, only stopping when the council re-entered the chamber to finish public comment.
Few residents who spoke during the meeting supported the change to City Council rules.
Arroyo Grande resident Ethel Landers said thanks to people making public comments unrelated to the agenda, more serious issues have been “muted” and have a worse chance of being heard and understood by the City Council.
“I am personally appalled by the number of repeat members of the public like Gaea Powell who come here to grandstand and gain attention for their own personal agendas,” Landers said. “I’ve had to watch Ms. Powell and her cohort stand before you, not only spouting off with anti-gay and anti-trans messages, but holding large pictures of p*rnography. These subjects are not in the purview of the Arroyo Grande City Council, and they’re quite disruptive to the rest of us who are dealing with issues that are in the purview of the City Council.”
Why was public comment changed?
Ray Russom said in recent years, public comment has become more of a grounds to speak about just about anything, rather than focusing on things the City Council can actually control.
The Arroyo Grande City Council and other city governments have had to contend with new forms of harassment during public comment such as Zoom bombing, which recently happened at an Atascadero City Council and San Luis Obispo Board of Supervisors meetings, Ray Russom said.
These disruptions made the council look into how to preserve the core of public comment while giving less time to non-agendized topics, Ray Russom said.
In the interest of still preserving public comment while limiting speakers’ ability to talk about anything and everything, the City Council voted to keep public comment at the start of the meeting with the lower time limit, Ray Russom said.
Following the second recess, Ray Russom said she found some attendees’ comments on the aforementioned LGBTQ issues “offensive,” and reiterated the need to keep comments related to things within the council’s purview.
Following the public comment period, Powell told The Tribune that the rule change is a “passive-aggressive way to try to show that they don’t have to listen to the citizens, and that they will not back down on their unconstitutional, random, arbitrary rules.”
“That’s more of the behavior of an administrative state or a police state, and not of a constitutional republic, so they’re wielding power that they really don’t have,” Powell continued.
Ray Russom said there are no immediate plans to revert or change the approved public comment structure based on one contentious meeting. She said for the most part, attendees were able to convey what they needed to say within the new time limit.
“Our job is to balance the need for us to give the public a forum to come forward on things we don’t know about, because we can’t agendize it if we don’t know about it,” Ray Russom told The Tribune on Wednesday. “We need general public comment, but we have to balance that with the increasing use of general public comment as a time to talk about any opinion that is or is not within the purview of the City Council.”
