‘Not the hill to die on’: Public can address Spokane City Council members after protest last week

After last week’s meeting was shut down during a protest over the Spokane City Council’s declaration of support for Israel and a rule limiting how speakers could address their elected leaders, Monday’s meeting proceeded without incident.

Open forum, during which a protest broke out last week, was moved from the beginning of the meeting to the end. Last week’s meeting was called off before any of the council’s legislative items was addressed, and all of those ordinances and resolutions were moved to Monday’s agenda.

For weeks, pro-Palestinian activists have attended Spokane City Council meetings to protest the unanimous passage of a resolution that condemned the “violent acts of war” perpetrated on the state of Israel on Oct. 7 without mention of historic and current conditions in Palestine.

The efforts to call out what they perceived as a “historically illiterate” statement by the City Council have been stymied, however, when speakers attempted to name the resolution’s most vocal supporters, Councilman Michael Cathcart and sponsor Councilman Jonathan Bingle. Council President Lori Kinnear began barring members of the public from naming council members, citing a council rule that requires comments to be directed to the president.

There has been disagreement over whether that rule bars naming a council member, or whether such an interpretation of the rule would violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. That disagreement boiled over at the Nov. 6 meeting, with speakers repeatedly naming Cathcart and Bingle, being told they were in violation of council rules, and then continuing to name those council members.

At last week’s meeting, Justice Forral, a local activist with Spokane Community Against Racism and the chair of the Justice Not Jails committee that successfully opposed Measure 1 on the November ballot, tried to read a verbatim transcript of a speaker having their comments curtailed at an earlier meeting.

After repeated requests for Forral to not name Cathcart and Bingle, Kinnear attempted to cut off his comments. Forral demanded to finish speaking, at which point council members walked away from the dais. Around 30 minutes later, Kinnear appeared via video conferencing software and declared the meeting was adjourned.

In a brief interview after the meeting , Forral said the protesters had anticipated disruption if Kinnear continued to enforce a broader interpretation of the rule, and said the council would no longer be able to hold meetings without protest if the rule wasn’t changed.

“How do we talk about things?” Forral asked. “How do we hold anybody accountable? How do we hold our City Council members accountable if we can never name them?

Redress of grievances

By the end of the week, Kinnear would concede to the protesters, saying the council’s rules would be relaxed and speakers could name council members in their comments.

But she was initially defiant, saying last Tuesday that the rule would remain in place until a new council was sworn in at the start of next year.

She maintained that the public comment period at council meetings was a limited public forum, in which the public could address government officials but the City Council could set rules on those comments.

“We can set the rules,” she said. “In fact, we don’t have to have an open forum at all. Bellingham has no open forum. It’s not in state law; it’s not in code. We do not need to have it.”

This interpretation was on shaky constitutional ground, said Kevin Goldberg, an attorney and the First Amendment specialist for the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.

Governments are limited in their ability to restrict freedom of speech, and those restrictions have to be content-neutral, Goldberg said, meaning rules cannot be enforced differently based on the content of what a speaker is saying, such as criticizing council members for their support of the pro-Israel resolution.

While the City Council has applied this rule in other circumstances, including to shutdown speakers who criticized Councilman Zack Zappone’s role in redistricting efforts last year, it has not been used consistently, including when speakers have been complimentary .

“If I address them in a respectful tone, they’re not going to get upset, but if I’m being disrespectful, they’re going to crack down on me,” Goldberg said. “They seem to be trying to quash dissent.”

Goldberg pointed to a case in Georgia, where a judge last November ruled the Forsyth County Board of Education’s requirement that members of the public address board members in a “respectful manner” was unconstitutional.

“While I understand the need to do business and a desire to do it in a civil, community-minded manner, that doesn’t mean the body gets to set the rules,” Goldberg said.

Bingle and Cathcart agree the rule shouldn’t have been interpreted the way it has been. However, both argued the rule, once interpreted, should be applied to the benefit of everyone on the council.

“We update our rules every year, and I will push hard for this to change,” Bingle said. “But hand in hand with that, is the rules need to be followed. What you cannot do is hijack the meeting to push your agenda.”

Cathcart argued the council handled the protest in the only way it was prepared to : shutting down the meeting, rather than relocating to another room or having law enforcement clear the chambers.

“We will be far more prepared if it happens again,” Cathcart said.

Be it resolved

While Kinnear has acquiesced and will not continue to bar speakers from naming council members, saying she was advised this was “not the hill to die on,” she argued the rule was never the point of the protests.

“That was not what last night was about,” Kinnear said last Tuesday. “It was what they decided they wanted to make an issue. The real issue is that people are upset about the resolution over Israel.”

Forral disputed this, saying the group planned to follow every rule of the council meeting with the sole exception of naming council members. It was not protesters who shut down last week’s meeting, he said, but the City Council itself.

“This is another way that they’re trying to paint us activists, or us people who come to the podium, as disruptive or wild,” Forral said. “It’s another way to discredit the people who come, who are passionate and care about the community and want to speak on the things they love, to discredit those people.”

Pro-Palestinian activists have said the resolution was “racist” and “historically illiterate,” arguing the City Council had not considered Israel’s role in the tensions in that region or consulted Palestinian-Americans living in Spokane before voting on the resolution, which was introduced with little public notice on the same day it was approved.

Speakers continued to object to the Oct. 9 resolution Monday, but the meeting proceeded without disruption.

David Brookbank, whose objection to the resolution on Oct. 16 was the first to be interrupted as he named Cathcart and Bingle, called on the City Council again Monday to rescind the resolution.

“The reasons for rescinding the resolution are abundant, particularly in light of international condemnation of Israel for grossly disproportionate violence against Palestinian civilians,” Brookbank said.