The Cary Town Council plans to adopt a new decorum policy clarifying what speakers and audience members can and cannot do during town meetings.
For the most part, the policy—which is still only a draft and has not been adopted—takes preexisting rules and reminders about public comment from Cary’s website and meeting agendas and consolidates them into one document: Speakers should adhere to the time limit and cannot speak more than once per public hearing, for instance. Notable additions to the existing rules include a prohibition on audience “comments, questions, jeering, applause, or speaking” during public comment and a description of the enforcement actions the mayor can take if someone violates the policy.
At a work session on Thursday, the town council talked about the impetus for the policy: A July council meeting where dozens of audience members shouted at the council members and each other for hours over the former town manager’s resignation and a contentious affordable housing proposal. Anger seemed to spread contagiously through the crowd, which grew louder and ruder as the five-hour meeting progressed. Much of their vitriol was directed at the council for its perceived role in overlooking or enabling the former manager’s misconduct, and for what the audience seemed to agree was a too-fast timeline on the housing proposal—but they were also yelling at each other. The police officers who regularly stand at the doors of town hall chambers had to go into the audience and tell people to stop heckling the speakers at the podium. Several speakers blasted past the conclusion of their allotted time to continue haranguing the council and their opponents in the crowd. Mayor Harold Weinbrecht’s calls for order were mostly ignored.
Weinbrecht called it “the worst audience behavior I have witnessed at a council meeting” in his 22-plus years of public service in a blog post.
“Citizens who take the time to address the council deserve to do so without fear of ridicule or interruption,” he wrote. “Every member of the council deserves the opportunity to conduct the public’s business without constant heckling and personal attacks.”
“This is not about the individual speakers that stepped up to the microphone and let us have it,” Councilmember Carissa Kohn-Johnson said at the work session. “What folks don’t see on a recording is what I’ll call genuinely menacing behavior from several people sitting in town hall … jeering from their seats, fighting with their neighbors, police officers having to step in and make sure it doesn’t come to fisticuffs during a council meeting.”
The draft policy prohibits speaker conduct “that materially disrupts or impedes the orderly conduct of the meeting, including refusing to comply with time limits or reasonable directions of the presiding officer; physically obstructing access to, or proceedings of, the meeting; threatening physical harm; intimidating or interfering with another participant or staff; or continuing to speak after their allotted time has ended.”
If someone breaks the rules, the policy lays out a series of enforcement actions the mayor (or “presiding officer,” if the mayor is absent) can take, beginning with cutting off a speaker’s audio feed. They can also opt to recess or adjourn the meeting or ask a speaker or audience member who is repeatedly disruptive to leave. The policy also includes a reminder that per state law, anyone who disrupts a meeting and refuses to leave at the mayor’s request can be charged with a Class 2 misdemeanor.
First Amendment Limitations
An earlier draft of the policy instructed speakers to be “civil and courteous in their language and presentation, and shall not make personal attacks or threats directed toward Town officials, Town staff, or members of the public.” But on Thursday, the council agreed at mayor pro tem Lori Bush’s recommendation to strike that sentence because it was too vague.
Kristina Wilson, a professor of public law and government at UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Government, told the INDY that state law gives towns plenty of discretion to set their own public comment rules “with one important limitation, which is the First Amendment.”
“The more detailed and clear and the less subjective our policies are, the more likely they can withstand constitutional challenge,” Wilson said.
Wilson confirmed that the ban on audience applause and jeering in the draft policy—though potentially hard to enforce—passes constitutional muster. First Amendment freedom of speech protections only apply to public commenters, not to audience members, she explained.
“The First Amendment is trying to do something really difficult, which is balance everybody’s right to speak and be heard with the fact that allowing everybody to speak and be heard will absolutely slow progress and make having a government meeting nearly impossible,” Wilson said with a chuckle.
The council members emphasized that they aren’t looking to stifle their critics.
“This is not about curtailing … the content of what they share with us or the passion that they share with us,” Councilmember Brittany Richards said.
At the work session, Weinbrecht named who he considers to be the instigators of July’s audience outbursts: “the media.”
“The last meeting was basically, in my mind, out of control, and they were feeding off the media, who absolutely loved it and that’s why they were there. They create stories to generate the audience, and the audience generates the stories for the media, and that’s exactly what they like to see,” Weinbrecht said.
Cary has received a good deal of critical local news coverage in the aftermath of former town manager Sean Stegall’s resignation. On his blog, Weinbrecht has lamented “the television media”’s “continued effort to discredit me, undermine my character, and destroy my credibility,” “constant negativity” from “some media outlets,” and what he deems “clickbait coverage” of the manager transition.
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