Spokane City Council’s open forum may be limited to once per month

The public’s time to voice its opinions to the Spokane City Council may change significantly later this year, if a proposal sponsored by Council President Betsy Wilkerson is approved during the Council’s first meeting of the year Monday.

Some worry that the rule change, which would dedicate one meeting per month to open forum testimony and end the practice during every other legislative meeting, will make the City Council less accessible. Others hope that a designated meeting just for public comment will prevent a single issue from dominating the night and stop the few who speak nearly every week from using up all of the available speaking slots.

Currently, the public can comment during the City Council’s Monday evening legislative meetings – where local laws are passed, budgets are approved and resolutions are read out – during two distinct periods.

People can address specific legislative items after they’re introduced but before the City Council votes on them, a process with relatively few limitations that will remain unchanged. The City Council also has an open forum period every night, when anyone can speak their minds about any issue not up for consideration or a vote, such as unaddressed problems facing the city or a previous Council action that the speaker believes was a mistake.

The form of that open forum has changed significantly over the years, with various compositions of the Spokane City Council holding them at the beginning or the end of the legislative meetings, as well as changing how much time a person would have to speak or how many people could speak in a night. Presently, 15 people are able to speak at each week’s meeting for up to 2 minutes apiece, with priority given to the first to sign up and those who have not spoken at a prior meeting that month.

If the resolution is approved, up to 40 people could speak during the monthly open forum, still for 2 minutes each.

It’s not uncommon for the same three or four people to sign up every week. As of late, however, most of the available slots for speaking have been taken up by speakers responding, almost always negatively, to the City Council’s Oct. 9 resolution condemning the terrorist attack against Israel days prior and supporting that country’s right to “exist and defend itself … .”

Pro-Palestinian activists have protested the resolution as “racist” and “historically illiterate,” arguing that 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.

With little to no ability to testify on the resolution before it was approved, speakers have instead used the open forum period en masse to criticize the decision and call for the resolution to be rescinded.

The pushback may pay off, with Wilkerson and Councilman Zack Zappone participating in conversations with protesters about a potential new resolution.

But it has also frustrated some hoping to speak about other matters, Wilkerson said during a Tuesday interview.

“That first half-hour can be dominated by one topic, and we were hearing from citizens who felt they were not able to talk about what else was going on in the city,” she said.

But others worry that segregating the open forum to a single meeting would effectively limit how easily the public could raise its concerns to its elected representatives.

“We need to give people the ability to come up and say their piece to elected officials,” said Councilman Jonathan Bingle, who opposes the proposed changes. “I want people to have as much access as possible.”

Recently elected Councilman Paul Dillon was initially skeptical of the proposed changes, noting that he wasn’t part of the conversations to craft the resolution but worrying about limiting public input.

“I think we want to make sure we make ourselves as accessible as possible, not less,” Dillon said. “I think it’s worth putting this out to the community to see if this does strike the right balance.”

Bingle suggested that open forum might instead be split into two sections, with only 15 allowed to speak before the legislative meeting but an unlimited number of speakers being allowed at the end.

“We have tried that,” Wilkerson said in response to Bingle’s suggestion. “I’m trying to get some balance for council as well – we have a younger council, most of them do have children, and the practical implication is more challenging than, let’s just let people speak until they’re done.”

Bingle, a father of three whose family just added twin babies in July, disagreed that the Council’s rules should be influenced by the demands of his personal life.

“Selfishly, I understand how it would be good to us because we get out of our meetings quicker, but a big part of my job is listening to people,” Bingle said.

Wilkerson said Tuesday she believed she had majority support for the changes, but added that the rules could be changed again if it proved problematic.

If Wilkerson’s resolution is approved Monday, it would have a cascading effect on all of the other legislative meetings. In order to provide sufficient time for the public to speak, the monthly meeting designated for open forum would be stripped of nearly all legislative actions, which would need to be taken up at a different meeting.