Bellingham City Council makes a decision on public comments. Here’s how it will work
Bellingham City Council will start allowing public comments again, 18 months after that part of its meetings was suspended amid concerns regarding misinformation and other false claims that speakers were making about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Public comments will resume on Feb. 27 during the City Council’s meeting, Council President Michael Lilliquist said during a committee session Monday afternoon, Feb. 13.
Lilliquist said the public comment period will be scheduled toward the end of regular City Council meetings, after the time that is generally reserved for the final reading of ordinances.
Comments will be allowed both live from City Hall, and also from speakers online, because meetings are being held in that hybrid format.
Total public comment will be limited to 30 minutes, with each speaker allowed 3 minutes to address the council, Lilliquist said.
“As council president, I will enforce those rules with reminders and other appropriate steps,” he said.
“If it turns out that (30 minutes) is too much or too little, we can adjust it,” Lilliquist said.
Comments won’t be posted to the city’s YouTube channel along with the rest of the City Council meetings and committee sessions, but they will be posted to the city’s website, Lilliquist said.
That’s an apparent effort to avoid violating YouTube rules restricting medical misinformation.
How we got here
Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, speakers at the Bellingham City Council have used that forum to rail against COVID-19 restrictions such as masking, business closings and vaccinations.
They’ve promoted disproven remedies for the virus and made false claims that included antisemitic comparisons to the Holocaust.
Public comment was suspended from City Council meetings when YouTube, which is owned by Google, briefly removed a recording of the July 12, 2021, council meeting from the City of Bellingham Meetings channel.
A Google spokesperson told The Bellingham Herald in July 2021 that comments made during the July 12, 2021, meeting violated YouTube rules.
Google’s spokeswoman told The Herald that exceptions to its rules were allowed for official government meetings, and that the meeting was restored to the city’s channel.
But Bellingham city officials were unable to contact YouTube or Google, and city officials scuttled further public comment for fear of losing access to meetings archived on YouTube.
A compromise effort was made for several months starting in September 2021, where a few City Council members — but not enough to be considered a voting quorum — would listen to public comment in sessions that weren’t posted online.
This story was originally published February 14, 2023 at 10:55 AM.
