Raleigh’s new mayor says she wants decorum, but some say she’s curtailing free speech
With gavel in hand, Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin cut off a woman who was speaking during a public meeting of the City Council last week.
Baldwin warned the woman if she broke the city’s rules again she’d be asked to stop talking altogether and leave.
Her offense? She mentioned the police chief by name.
“I want to remind everyone about the rules of decorum, and please pay attention, because we do not want to have to ask people to leave or be removed from the chambers for violating these, OK?” Baldwin had said at the beginning of the meeting. “This does not limit anything you can say, but there are certain rules we ask you to follow.”
Community members are allowed to speak at public meetings so long as they follow a set of rules. One of those rules says speakers may not address individual council members. Baldwin said she asked if staff could be included in the rules of decorum and was told it was up to her discretion. So she added city staff to the rules and mentioned it before the Tuesday meeting.
“Former council had no problem calling out city staff publicly, (and) I firmly disagree with that,” Baldwin said. “That was also coupled with citizens calling out city staff, which led to morale issues among staff being publicly called out. They are not elected officials. We are. So when I asked about the staff issue what I was told was that is partly up to your discretion, meaning me.”
“If someone wants to question us, I am fine with that,” she said. “But the staff I feel that is inappropriate. We are the elected officials, not them.”
The woman who spoke, Barbara Smalley-McMahan, was frustrated with Raleigh Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown’s response after a different woman accused an officer of sexual assault after a traffic stop. And she mentioned the chief by name.
ACLU disagrees with Baldwin
Susanna Birdsong, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, said if you look at the context of the speaker’s comment, “it is an issue of public concern and as the head of the police department it is acceptable for the police chief to have been named by name.”
Rules requiring speakers to address the council as a whole rather than individually are common, Birdsong said, but the mayor was wrong when she expanded that rule to prevent speakers from naming city staff.
“City council meetings play a critical role in our democracy, in particular at the local level, and they are intended to provide a direct and clear avenue for residents to engage with and, that includes disagree with, those who make decisions in their community,” she said. “And when our ability to directly engage with our local elected officials slowly erodes it undermines the integrity of our entire government and democracy.”
Brooks Fuller of the NC Open Government Coalition said rules restricting speakers at public meetings are often challenged as violations of the First Amendment. But, Fuller said, the constitutionality of those rules depends on whether they are implemented without regard to content.
“The city of Raleigh has a strong interest in promoting constructive debate, but this policy seems to undermine that objective,” Fuller said. “This is especially so if citizens aren’t allowed to voice concerns about specific public officials or city employees. The city is absolutely entitled to limit disruptive or violent outbursts at its meetings and to keep discussion germane to its business, but it does not have the power under state law or the U.S. Constitution to keep its employees safe from critique by the people they serve.”
Rule changes being reviewed
Council members Jonathan Melton and Patrick Buffkin, both attorneys, expressed interest in changing the rules even before the recent meeting, Baldwin said.
In a tweet, Melton said “fair and transparent rules are important” and people should be able to address council members individually.
The council members and city staff won’t just be looking at the rule that bars addressing individual council members. All of the rules will be reviewed and compared with rules in other cities, like Durham, Baldwin said.
“We are looking at making it friendlier for citizens to step up to the podium and speak,” she said.
Baldwin said there is interest in the Raleigh rule that prevents people from standing with someone at the podium.
“For some people that can be intimidating,” she said. “So we are looking at all of it as a whole and just saying what we are trying to achieve is decorum, respect and civility, and then also making it more citizen-first.”
There hasn’t been discussion about changing when residents must sign up to speak at a meeting, Baldwin said.
Raleigh has been criticized for making residents sign up two weeks in advance, almost always before the list of meeting topics are posted. The idea is to give staff members more time to address resident concerns, but some say the rule is restrictive and keeps people from speaking about timely issues.
The city’s rules of decorum were also the subject of a controversial campaign mailer critical of Council member David Cox. The mailer featured a photo of a woman with duct tape over her mouth and said, “David Cox thinks you should shut up.”
It came in response to the council’s decision to limit speakers’ comments to the council as a whole and not individual members. That decision was made after several meetings where speakers were critical of individual council members, including Cox and Dickie Thompson. Thompson made the motion to change the rules.
The rules have actually been on the city’s books for several years, but speakers weren’t informed of them and they weren’t enforced until this summer.
This story was originally published December 13, 2019 at 6:25 AM.
