Right-to-comment law gets another try

Published: Saturday, November 24, 2012 at 4:24 p.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, November 24, 2012 at 4:24 p.m.

The first round of bills that fall into the legislative hopper tend to be reruns.

So, right after the legislators were sworn in last week and the Senate opened its inbox, some familiar measures reappeared.

There was a resolution to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, something that has been kicking around since the 1970s. There was a bill to ban texting while driving because it's a spectacularly dangerous thing that people do anyway.

And there was a bill to guarantee the public's right to speak at government meetings. Something that didn't get the attention it deserved last session. Or the session before that.

This bill would fill in a missing piece in the state's Government in the Sunshine Law.

You'd think the very definition of an open meeting would be a meeting where people could hear and be heard. And you'd be wrong.

Two court cases — one involving the St. Johns River Water Management District and another involving an obscure Pensacola board overseeing the building of a waterfront park complex — held the Sunshine Law only says that meetings have to be held in public. It doesn't say anything about listening to the public.

In practice, cities in Volusia and Flagler counties tend to be good about giving people a chance to speak up, speak out and, generally, make their views known.

Every city seems to have at least a couple of citizens who have deputized themselves with the task of giving the town their input on all imaginable topics.

Yes, this can make meetings go long. And yes, the comments can get heated.

Only last week, a man denounced the Palm Coast City Council with such a white-hot stream of opprobrium that he keeled over and was taken to the hospital before he could finish telling the commissioners and city staff the full extent of his unhappiness with them.

But usually, the discourse is of a far healthier nature.

Which is why this is too important a matter to leave up to mere local custom.

State Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, filed the bill, which mandated that "members of the public shall be given a reasonable opportunity to be heard on a proposition" being considered by any state or local board, commission or council.

The part of the legislation addressing that modifier "reasonable" would allow governments to enforce time limits, require speakers to fill out forms stating who they are and what they want to address and limit comment to group spokespeople at those rare meetings where there's an overflow crowd of like-minded people.

This law wouldn't make local governments do anything that most of them don't do already. Until the recent court rulings, most officials just assumed they had to do this. So, the opposition this bill has received is hard to understand.

Now that courts have given permission to turn off the meeting microphones, it's a good idea to fill in this hole in the open government law.


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