What can be done about off-topic, random commenters at city council meetings?

The first city council meeting of the new year was yet another reminder that Sacramento’s civic engagement is, at best, amusingly off topic and, at worst, in dire need of reform.

Consider: A young man named Chad Taylor kicked off public comment at this first meeting of 2014 to address the timely and relevant issue of—water fluoridation.

“I want to know why this is not being addressed by anybody,” he demanded of the council. (Never mind that, as Councilman Steve Cohn pointed out, council has discussed fluoride on multiple occasions and as recently as two years ago.) Taylor focused on fluoride for his full two minutes of comment, even going over his allotted time until the mayor asked for his final thought.

“My final thought?” Taylor said.

“Your final thought?” the mayor gently repeated.

“OK,” Taylor mumbled—then completely changed the subject to talk about gun-owner’s rights.

Subsequent public commenters on that January 7 evening addressed other dubiously germane matters, such as Sacramento’s need for a “national ranger force,” moonshine, metal detecting, terrorism and whether one should call 911 because of a dead bird on one’s front lawn.

One regular commenter, civil-rights activist Tim Boyd, even got into a spat with a council member. Boyd spoke of the disenfranchisement of longstanding Oak Park residents, returned to his seat, then started hollering at Councilman Jay Schenirer.

Mayor Kevin Johnson himself had to intervene. “You know what … that’s just not the decorum, and now you’re getting all out of bounds,” he told Boyd.

It didn’t end there. Minutes later, Boyd returned to the podium—for the third time in less than 53 minutes—to speak for another two minutes, where he chided Councilman Schenirer for sneaking a bite of food on the dais, calling him “a total joke.”

After more than an hour, the actual agenda items of the night finally commenced. Which raises the question: Is this really the best way to go about civic engagement and public meetings?

Over the past decade, the city has tinkered with the rules of the city-council meeting game. A few years ago, it reduced the time for public comment from three minutes to two.

Community advocates such as Craig Powell at Eye on Sacramento, a government-watchdog group, have told SN&R that trimming public-comment time down didn’t save the city any time at meetings and also “really degraded the quality of the public comments.”

But other observers of Sacramento civic debate, such as Ash Roughani of the Midtown-based “civic incubator” startup Public Innovation, says improving the quality of debate is perhaps less about time at the podium and more about how government interacts with the public.

“People who are most passionate about coming to existing council meetings generally have a hard-line position one way or another,” Roughani observed. He’s right: The average citizen, who may care about certain issues, probably never actually learns that they’re being debated, because they’re not tapped into the public process. Or they’re turned off by government’s antiquated, technology-unfriendly approach to civic interaction.

“Think about the dais,” Roughani said of the curved table where council members sit, “that’s a perfect example of things that feel outdated.” He called it “royaltyesque.”

Meanwhile, those who end up at meetings typically have their own personal agenda.

To amend this, Roughani says governments need to “break down the entire public-meeting process, from how things end up on the agenda, to how that meeting is posted, to how people find out about it,” and so on. He thinks that if Sacramento prioritizes such reforms, it will see more responsible civic engagement.

Of course, the city’s priorities are many—and tweaking public communications is not at the top.

Until that happens, leaders will continue to endure city council meetings such as the second one of this new year, on January 14.

Mac Worthy, regular public commenter known for the catch phrase “pimping the people,” returned last week to speak about Dennis Rodman, North Korea and homosexuality in professional sports.

Lorraine Brown also was there this time to complain about the drought. “We’re wasting water building automobiles,” she argued. “But we do need to water our lawn. Let’s have some common sense here!”

Worthy chimed in as well on water rationing. “When the ocean starts to go down, then we’ll be short of water. People, we aren’t short of water.”

And then there’s David Adine, who had a very big problem. “[My] emergency probably makes me one of the most frustrated people in the entire world,” he told the city council. “I know I’m definitely the most frustrated person in Sacramento.”

Why was he so upset?

He couldn’t access the Internet at the law library.