Editorial | Claptrap
Cape Coral City Council drove another nail into its public comment coffin Wednesday night, tweaking its meeting rules to carve out an exception for good clapping while continuing to prohibit the bad, disruptive kind like applause of criticisms made during public comment.
The council action was taken for a couple of reasons.
One, it’s a legal maneuver to better position the city against another First Amendment lawsuit, which, we predict, is coming.
Regular critics of city staff and/or council actions have been actively testing the limits of council’s propensity to deem clapping for kudos OK while clapping for a verbal slapping by appreciative meeting attendees relegated to what is viewed as the peanut gallery results in being gaveled and threatened with ouster.
The rule change approved 5-3 Wednesday night tidies things up by specifically singling out awards and recognitions.
Clap away.
But only because you have permission and council deems the applause is warranted.
Two, the tweak is part of an overt progressive slide to get critics to well, shut up.
At least at televised council meetings where the elected board has effectively erased pesky public input from view.
In a series of steps over the last couple of years the city has:
• Moved its public comment hour from the beginning of its meetings to the end, effectively giving the public no opportunity to comment on consent agenda items — most of them expenditures — before council votes.
• Changed the focus of its cameras so that speakers at public comment were shown from the back, breaking a long tradition of the same from-the-front closeups council and staff are afforded while speaking.
• Moved the podium from the center of the chamber in front of the dais off to the side so that public comment speakers are all but invisible to those viewing the session.
Which is a primary goal of a majority of Council, which would love to add “not heard” to its accomplished “not seen.”
A couple of things.
Does the city have to accept behavior that disrupts its meetings?
It does not.
The city has the right to adopt — and enforce — rules of decorum.
But as the city — or at least we, the taxpayers who paid the $100,000 settlement to a meeting attendee who was deemed disruptive because he wasn’t sitting in his seat properly learned — the definition of disruption is more than words on paper.
Councilmembers Rachel Kaduk, Jennifer Nelson-Lastra and Keith Long, an attorney, grasped this and voted against the amended council rules Wednesday.
“I believe let them clap,” said Councilmember Kaduk, succinctly summing up the minority position.
And clap meeting attendees did, during public comment, held as per council’s previous meeting change, after the vote.
Let us offer some applause as well.
Slow clap here.
This claptrap accomplished nothing.
It simply widened the divide between those on the dais and those quite literally pushed aside.
Breeze editorial