Bloomington city council OKs uniform 3-minute time at public mic, adopts policy to remove rule breakers

People who attend Bloomington city council meetings and want to address the local legislature will now have a uniform three minutes at the public mic—instead of a default of five minutes, but sometimes less.

That’s the result of a unanimous vote on Wednesday night to enact an ordinance that changes the council’s regular order of business to prescribe a 3-minute time limit at the public mic, for items not on the meeting agenda. There are two slots for public comment on non-agenda items, near the start and near the end of a regular meeting.

The customary time limit for commentary on items that do appear on the agenda has for years been three minutes.

The wording changed by the council was: “Speakers are allowed five minutes; this time allotment may be reduced by the presiding officer if numerous people wish to speak.”

The new wording is: “Speakers are allowed up to three minutes each.”

The thinking behind the change, as expressed in a memo by council president Isabel Piedmont-Smith, is to give some certainty to people who want to address the council, about how long they will be allowed to speak.

Over the last few years, it has not been uncommon for the council president to assess the crowd in the chambers, or who are participating on the Zoom video conferencing platform, and to adjust the time limit down to three minutes per speaker.

But earlier this year, during some meetings when a big crowd showed up to comment, asking for a resolution about a ceasefire in Gaza, that limit was further reduced to two minutes.

In the past, the council president has sometimes just set the time limit for general public comment on non-agenda items at three minutes instead of five, even though there was just one person who wanted to speak.

On Wednesday night, councilmember Courtney Daily said that for some people, like herself, any announcement that one minute would be shaved off the allowed time per speaker, could cause them not to speak at all.

Daily put it like this: “As somebody who likes to prepare very well ahead of time, before I’m going to speak in public—and who has been known to practice to meet certain time limits—to show up somewhere and find out I’ve got to shave a minute off my prepared and practiced words, is enough to make me sit down and say: Well, then, I’m just not going to speak at all.”

As part of the ordinance change, the council also adopted a change to the usual agenda order of first and second readings of legislation. That change was based on the idea that a long meeting could cause a delay in getting legislation introduced.

Not a part of the ordinance was a change to the set of rules for behavior by the public during its commentary.

So the city council adopted a change from the old rules  to the new rules on a simple motion and a voice vote.

The essential difference between the two sets of rules is the change from a five-minute to a three-minute time limit.

But the change includes some additional wording that is meant to give the council the legal authority to remove members of the public from a meeting, if they get out of line.

A new state law, enacted during this year’s legislative session, says that the presiding officer of a public meeting can issue warnings to attendees who “disrupt a meeting,” and after they are given three warnings, they can be told to leave, or forced to leave by a law enforcement officer.

To the extent that the ability to eject someone from a meeting relies on the new state statute, Bloomington’s city council appears to be asserting an equivalence between “disrupt a meeting” and “violates these rules.” The wording adopted by the council goes like this:

Any person who violates these rules will be declared out of order by the Chair and will receive a warning. If an attendee receives three (3) warnings, the Chair may, upon issuing the third warning, direct: 1) the attendee to leave the meeting; and 2) a law enforcement officer to remove the attendee from the meeting, if the attendee refuses to leave when directed by the Chair for a violation of these rules.

The new public commentary rules leave intact the wording in the old rules that refers to members of the public as “citizens.” It’s a usage that has in other contexts been eliminated by the city of Bloomington. For example, the Citizens Academy is now called the Residents Academy.

The new rules also leave intact the wording that says, “[P]lease state your name for the record and speak directly into the microphone.”

A year ago, a speaker refused to state his name—after being interrupted repeatedly by then-council president Sue Sgambelluri and told to state his name. That led Sgambelluri to cut his mic, and to recess the meeting. All councilmembers filed out of the chambers.

A few weeks ago, at the same speaker’s most recent turn at the mic, council president Isabel Piedmont-Smith did not insist that he state his name, or to state for the record what she believed his name to be, which had been her practice up until then.

Indiana’s Open Door Law does not require a public body to allow a member of the public to give commentary at a meeting.

That is consistent with similar laws in other states, which give members of the public the right to attend, but not to speak to a public body during a meeting.

But in some states, the right of the public to speak to a public body during a meeting is guaranteed under state statute. Michigan’s Open Meetings Act, for example, states: “A person must be permitted to address a meeting of a public body under rules established and recorded by the public body.”