City boards and commissions take up pallet yard zoning, parks budget cuts, housing conversions, and historic preservation at a busy week of civic meetings.
About six months after the City Council adopted stricter meeting rules, the debate over public comment still turns on two competing ideas: what residents expect their remarks to accomplish and what state law allows councilmembers to do in response.
The changes also imposed a 15-minute debate limit on councilmembers, adjusted the summer meeting schedule – but the council added a six-month review period after resident pushback.
Ward 1 Councilmember Philip Falcone said the council was trying to keep meetings efficient without shutting residents out.
"Our city council meetings are not public meetings. They're not community forums," he said. "They are business meetings held in public."
Falcone said shortening public comment on crowded agendas from three minutes to two minutes has been used sparingly since the change took effect – and only to avoid turning away large numbers of speakers.
"Instead of saying, you know, there's 60 of you here, sorry, we're only taking 10 [speakers]," he said, "we'll take everybody, but we're going to shorten it from three minutes to two minutes."
City Clerk Donesia Gause told the Gazette that on Oct. 14 the council took action to reduce individual speaker time from three minutes to two minutes, during which time a total of 76 public comments were received.
Since the new rules were updated, Gause said, Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson has only curtailed the public comment portion of the meeting on one occasion – April 7, reducing the oral communication period for general public comment to 45 minutes.
Falcone said the city wants public participation, but the local government has to work within limits.
The Brown Act bars councilmembers from engaging in open-ended debate during public comment, but it does not require total silence.
Falcone also said the Brown Act does not allow the back-and-forth some residents seem to want – though councilmembers can refer matters to staff, ask to agendize the topic for a future meeting, ask a clarifying question or give a brief response in some cases.
"I think that it's incumbent on residents to be informed over what the city council can and cannot do and how our meetings operate and how we can have effective communication in a business meeting that just happens to be open to the public," he said.
Keith Nelson, a former Riverside Board of Ethics chair, said the council is trying to solve the wrong problem.
"My attitude to the council was, don't change public comment. Change the way you govern, so there's less public comment," he said. "I think it's an avoidance scheme, and I don't think it's going very well."
Nelson said the council's behavior discourages trust rather than building it, especially when residents raise concerns about Measure Z spending, homelessness or oversight.
Nelson also pushed back on the idea that council meetings are just business sessions.
"They are our employees," he said of elected officials. "We didn't elect a king."
He argued that public comment exists because residents are not being adequately heard in other parts of the process, and said councilmembers should welcome criticism rather than treat it as a burden.
Elizabeth Ayala, a former Riverside resident who now lives in Highgrove, said city hall can be responsive in administrative ways without being responsive in a larger civic sense.
"I think Riverside government and council is responsive in customer service ways, [and I] commend them for keeping the Zoom option at city council," she said.
But she added, "So responsive to who? Interested in what vision for Riverside?"
Ayala said she believes the current council is less concerned with working-class households than with interests that fit a more upscale vision for the city.
That divide gets to the heart of the frustration many residents describe: not just whether they are allowed to speak, but whether speaking changes anything.
"I think that it's a two-way street," Falcone said, arguing that residents should understand the limits of local authority while city officials work to communicate more clearly.
For officials, the revised rules preserve access while keeping meetings moving. For some critics, they still feel like a way to manage dissent instead of listening to it.
Civic Engagement Reporter who calls the Inland Empire home. Five years covering SoCal. APU journalism grad. Good conversations over coffee and stories that matter.
City boards and commissions take up pallet yard zoning, parks budget cuts, housing conversions, and historic preservation at a busy week of civic meetings.
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