March 18 was poised to be a busy night at Durham City Hall.
The city council was hosting its first public hearing for the 2024-25 fiscal year budget. The issue of public worker wages dominated the conversation during elections last fall, and this was an opportunity for residents to make their concerns known. But another issue resurfaced that evening. With the chamber and lobby seating full, residents who tried to enter the building after 7 p.m. were allegedly locked out for hours.
Council member DeDreana Freeman raised the concern to council on behalf of residents at the end of the budget hearing, spurring a brief but contentious back-and-forth with Mayor Leonardo Williams. Williams touched on the issue briefly before the meeting adjourned.
“For the record, we do not just kick people out or lock people out,” Williams said. “But I will choose safety. This mayor is going to follow those procedures that are set in place and once we get to capacity, the building will be held until there’s more available capacity inside, and that’s been clearly communicated.”
He reiterated his position at the work session the following Thursday.
“I want to make sure we’re consistent on what time we open the doors to make sure folks can be able to get in here, have enough time to get to the clerk’s desk to sign up [to speak] … but once the meeting starts, we’re now handling the business of the people,” he said. “It will not be a free-for-all. I just won’t tolerate it. I don’t want to put us in a position to be sued, either.”
In recent months, an unusually large number of residents have shown up to city council meetings to rally around galvanizing issues such as the ceasefire resolution, ShotSpotter, and city worker wages. After hundreds of protestors took over City Hall at a meeting in February, city administrators started cracking down on excess people allowed into the building and more strictly adhering to the building’s fire code. The change has left some residents on the outside looking in with little explanation as to what the rules are for accessing public meetings. They question whether those rules actually were clearly communicated, as Mayor Williams stated.
On February 5, nearly four months after the conflict between Israel and Hamas erupted, hundreds of Durham residents draped in keffiyehs and carrying roses flooded City Hall to pressure the council members to sign a ceasefire resolution. Every seat in the city chamber was filled. A sea of protestors spilled into the hallway. Residents looked on through the glass doors as the council proceeded with its regularly scheduled meeting, encountering little resistance from city staff or security when entering the building.
Forty-eight minutes later, the meeting came to a halt as protestors stood up and began singing in unison. A squad of Durham police entered the chambers and formed a barrier at the head of the dais. Yelling and arguing between factions in the audience interrupted the singing and chanting intermittently. The protest continued for 20 minutes before folks started leaving. After a short recess, the city council proceeded with city business, though an emotional charge lingered in the chamber.
Demonstrators returned on February 19 for the council’s formal vote on the Gaza ceasefire resolution. The evening air was frigid. Hundreds of residents huddled up in line outside the entrance to the building expecting to flood into City Hall as they had two weeks prior, but the procedure had changed. Officers at the front desk ushered them through the security check one at a time. A few chairs were set up in front of the monitors in the lobby to accommodate overflow from the chamber. Once the chamber seats and lobby chairs were filled, no one else was allowed in.
“This felt unexpected for us,” says Durham resident Charla Rios. “Because the first time, we were able to enter and people were able to sit on the floor or sit in other areas of the lobby and watch what was happening on the screens.”
Rios says the officers at the front desk handed out flyers to those who didn’t make it inside with instructions on how to watch the meetings virtually. But viewing the meeting wasn’t the only mission; it was about power in numbers.
“We had maybe 150 to 200 people outside at the start of the meeting,” Rios says. “It was unusually cold and people had other things to do so they started leaving.”
Those who persevered were blocked from entering the building with little understanding of why, according to multiple sources. At times, the doors to the building were physically locked to prevent people from slipping in behind those who were leaving. A security officer scrambled back and forth from the front desk to the chamber to keep an updated count of the number of available seats. As the night waned on and the temperature dropped, tensions rose.
Eventually, the remaining residents were allowed into the building around 11 p.m. after attendees who gave their public comments started to trickle out. The council voted to adopt a ceasefire resolution close to 1 a.m.
Rios says the lack of communication from city officials around how they are administering the rules and procedures for meeting attendance has been frustrating for residents.
“It’s inconsistent,” Rios says. “When we were all allowed to be in there, I would say easily 200 people were in the lobby watching online, standing outside of the chambers. We were able to do that one day, and then the next time, there’s a limited number of seats. The process is much slower. It’s hard not to wonder what the reasons for that are unless they’re communicated very clearly to us. And it feels like they were not.”
During a typical Monday night city council meeting, attendees mostly consist of city staff, land use lawyers, developers and property owners, and a handful of neighbors opposing new construction. Ceremonial items, which are recognized at the start of each meeting, can attract anywhere from 10 to 100 additional attendees. Rios says she questions why the overflow rule isn’t applied to ceremonial items and other types of events with high attendance.
“The rule should apply to every single issue, organization, and person across the board,” Rios says. “So that means moving forward, these are the rules for every event, regardless of if it’s a city council meeting or a citywide event, a function like a party, or any other events that they have in that building. If there’s concerns about the number of people, then that should apply to everything that happens in that building. If that’s not the case, then why would it just apply in one or two circumstances?”
Issues such as the ceasefire resolution have attracted an uptick in meeting participation, making seating on those nights more scarce. Some residents attend the meetings to speak on certain agenda items, others attend as a show of solidarity. Bo Ferguson, one of the City of Durham’s deputy managers, says city staffers do their best to accommodate residents who want to engage during meetings but have to balance attendance with public safety.
“All our efforts are centered around facilitating access to our public meetings, via in person or virtual,” Ferguson says. “If it is someone’s intent to watch or participate, we strive to make that as convenient and equitable as possible. It’s also our obligation to make those meetings safe, and capping attendance at the room and lobby’s seating capacity is a responsibility we take seriously.”
Ferguson says he understands that it’s frustrating for people who want to enter council chambers after it’s at capacity, but since they have the option to watch meetings online or on Zoom, “we believe that’s a reasonable option once our spaces have filled up.”
The stark difference in procedure from the February 5 and February 19 meetings caught many residents by surprise.
Attorney Elizabeth Simpson has been a Durham resident since 2010. She has participated in other public demonstrations in the past and likens the recent activism at City Hall to previous demonstrations over national issues such as Occupy Wall Street, the response to the murder of George Floyd, and local matters related to the expansion of the HEART program and the city budget. Simpson says the recent crackdown on meeting attendance is abnormal.
“Durham has set a precedent over a large number of years that if the chambers are full, there is overflow in the lobby,” Simpson says. “That is what the public has come to expect as part of the accommodation for access in-person. Once you open it up to the public … and create this expectation that this is part of the accommodation for an open meeting, they need to continue doing that unless they have a really good justification.”
Council member Javiera Caballero says the confusion about public meeting procedures comes from a lack of consistency with how the rules have been administered dating back to when Steve Schewel was mayor.
“A lot of the breakdown on council previously was people weren’t following procedures,” Caballero says. “But also procedures were outdated. And so you can’t criticize somebody for not following procedures when they haven’t been updated and people haven’t been following them, period.”
Caballero is the chair of the city’s Procedures Committee which includes council member Carl Rist, mayor pro tem Mark-Anthony Middleton, and mayor Williams. She says the committee is working to codify rules around issues such as managing public comment via Zoom and update rules around meeting decorum in an effort to offer clarity and consistency for residents who want to engage with the process.
“Leo [Williams] is being really firm on procedure because he was also on a council that lacked that,” Caballero says. “We had people shouting things from the walkway or shouting from the chamber, we had people naming staff members by name and saying things about them, and that’s not okay.”
For Rios, Simpson, and others, the inconsistency of the rules and lack of clarification from the council can seem like retaliation toward residents with certain social and political beliefs—residents in support of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, for instance.
“If you’re letting in people who are there for a zoning matter, you’re letting in people who are wearing Israeli flags, for instance, and giving them escorts, but you are locking out other members of the public who you perceive as having a different political view, and there’s seats available, then that’s viewpoint discrimination, and you can’t do that under the First Amendment,” Simpson says.
At the heart of the issue is a lack of communication between the security staff at the entrance to City Hall, the city staff who manage the building, and city council members who are charged with relaying information to the public from the dais. Without that communication, residents are left to judge for themselves whether they can engage in the democratic process.
“It’s important for council, because they are elected representatives of the constituents of Durham, to make sure that they’re communicating very clearly to everyone about what the rules and limitations are,” Rios says. “When you do have those inconsistencies, that’s where you have to wonder what’s not said. It’s hard not to feel like they are trying to keep us out of City Hall. That’s difficult to hear or see happen in a place where it feels like all Durham residents should be welcomed.”
Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on Twitter or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
You must be logged in to post a comment.