Council Committee Considers Revamping Public Comment Rules

The City may eliminate its requirement for residents to fill out speaker cards before addressing the City Council, as officials reviewed public comment procedures for compliance with state law at Tuesday's committee meeting.

The City's Governmental Processes Committee is examining Resolution 24255, which establishes council rules of procedure. Current rules require individuals to complete a speaker card before addressing the council, but this conflicts with the Brown Act, which protects the public's right to comment regardless of whether they complete a form.

"The Brown Act prohibits making this a mandatory condition for speaking," City Clerk Donesia Gause said regarding speaker cards. "In other words, a person cannot be denied the opportunity to comment simply because they didn't fill out a card."

The review, presented by Gause and Senior Deputy City Attorney Ruthann Solera, considers making speaker cards optional rather than mandatory and granting the presiding officer discretion to adjust time limits for public comment periods.

Committee Chair Philip Falcone acknowledged the tension between legal requirements and practical considerations.

"What's very frustrating for me is at least in the chambers, people have to approach the podium, they show their face," Falcone said. "But online people refuse to say their name, they refuse to say where they live."

Committee member Chuck Conder expressed support for maintaining speaker cards.

"I really think we need to have speaker cards and I think people need to tell us who they are because we have councilmembers that bus people in from Los Angeles County, the Central Valley, other areas that aren't from Riverside," Conder said.

The committee is considering changing the language from "shall" to "may" regarding speaker cards, or using the word "recommend" to encourage their use without making them mandatory.

Public speaker Pete Benavidez, the founder and CEO of Blindness Support Services, supported changing the speaker card requirement language.

"Having to complete a speaker's card independently may pose a challenge to people with disabilities," Benavidez said. "So I support that they change the word from shall to may."

Officials also discussed adjusting time limits for public comment. Currently, speakers typically receive three minutes, but the committee considered allowing the chair to reduce this to two minutes when there are more than twenty-five speaker cards on a particular item.

"If there were more than 25 speaker cards on a particular item, maybe that then goes from three minutes to two minutes per," Falcone suggested. "Don't give necessarily the chair the authority or the presiding officer the authority. Just make it based on a count and that would automatically trigger it."

Public speakers expressed concerns about the potential changes. Jason Hunter warned against giving the presiding officer unilateral authority to limit speaking time.

"I know that if we allow the presiding officer to unilaterally change public comment times through the limiting speakers, limiting comment time, limit individual speakers to less than three minutes, it will absolutely, positively be abused in order to provide for some sort of viewpoint discrimination," Hunter said.

The committee also considered consolidating all public comment provisions, which are currently scattered across several sections of the meeting, into a single section to eliminate confusion.

Other proposed changes include adjusting the summer meeting schedule from the first and third Tuesdays to the second and fourth Tuesdays of July and August, removing September from the summer schedule. The committee also discussed moving council brief reports to follow public comment at the beginning of meetings and establishing time limits for council member comments during discussions (ten minutes initially, with an additional five minutes for rebuttal). The committee also considered clarifying procedures for pulling items from the consent calendar.

The committee discussed a potential dress code for council members, though Falcone clarified this would only apply to elected officials, not the public.

"The dress code that we're reviewing is only for the city council," Falcone said. "We would never, never, ever talk about what the members of the public can wear."

The committee voted unanimously to direct staff to prepare a redline draft of the proposed changes for further review before presenting recommendations to the full City Council.

The Governmental Processes Committee will not meet in July but plans to continue the discussion when it reconvenes in August.