Public comment returning to Bellingham council meetings after YouTube removal. Here’s how
Some Bellingham City Council members will meet for a trial special session later this month to resume hearing public comment, a step they hope will solve what some members said was the hijacking of public meetings for political purposes and resulted in the city’s brief suspension from YouTube.
On a 6-0 vote, with Councilman Dan Hammill absent Monday night, Aug. 30, members approved a trial meeting to hear nothing but public comment.
“(We’re) wanting to be in a place where we’re wanting to be active listeners and engaged in that process when community members do come forward to share their interests or concerns,” Council President Hannah Stone said at Monday’s night’s council meeting.
At an earlier committee hearing Monday, Councilman Gene Knutson said he supports such a session held outside the format of a regular City Council meeting.
“But I would caution as of right now for us to go back and resume public comment because l guarantee you, the first meeting we’re going to get flooded by the anti-vaccination people,” Knutson said.
“They’re everywhere in town. They’re on our email, they’re in front of the hospital, they’re downtown. They’re going to flood that meeting and we’ll get in trouble with YouTube,” he said.
YouTube — the online video-sharing service where the city streams and archives its meetings and other information — briefly removed the video for the July 12 City Council meeting because several speakers spread lies and distortions about COVID-19, its treatments, and the vaccines against it.
Some of those speakers’ remarks also were criticized by a national anti-hate organization as trivializing the Holocaust.
Comment ‘hijacked’
Councilwoman Pinky Vargas said that council members already hear from the public via email, phone calls, social media and in other ways.
“I think that public comment is important, but I think that it has been hijacked right now, and I don’t feel it’s serving the purpose,” Vargas said.
Hammill was excused from the council’s evening session, but he opposed the special public comment session when it was discussed in committee.
“The level of toxicity that we’ve experienced, I feel like I’m in an alternate reality right now, that we are even having this discussion,” Hammill said.
“I’m here to try to help make my community better and to try to help people,” he said. “I don’t want to sit and listen to people argue against science. I got my vaccination as a front-line worker for the Food Bank. I got my shot back in March. My DNA has not changed. I cannot fly. I’m not a werewolf. To sit and listen to that for hours — I don’t know why we would want to invite more of that.”
Trial session set
Monday, Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. was selected for the first session since Sept. 6 is Labor Day and Sept. 13 is a regularly scheduled City Council meeting.
Only Stone and two other council members will attend on a rotating basis, so a quorum of the City Council won’t be present and the meeting will be streamed live but not recorded.
If the trial effort succeeds, further meetings would be at 7 p.m. on Mondays when the full council isn’t meeting.
Comment changes with COVID
Bellingham City Council members have traditionally scheduled a 15-minute public comment session, where anyone could go to City Hall and speak publicly for 3 minutes on any issue.
Public comment isn’t required by state law, but council members said they consider it part of their duty as elected officials.
For years, those in-person public comment sessions rarely ran past the 15 minutes that they were allotted on the council agenda.
And usually, they were civil.
Public comment wasn’t allowed at the City Council’s last in-person meeting on March 23, 2020, as city officials hastily enacted emergency health measures and took steps to move city business online ahead of statewide closures because of the widening COVID-19 pandemic.
At that meeting, political activist Tim Eyman arrived with a handful of supporters and demanded to be heard, falsely claiming that emergency rules enacted for the pandemic would restrict gun rights and other civil liberties.
But when City Council meetings moved online, more people began to take advantage of that virtual speaking opportunity, and the public comment sessions at times lasted over an hour.
Tensions rose at council meetings in winter 2021, as officials dismantled an encampment at City Hall, with speakers protesting what they said was a lack of services for people without permanent shelter.
Council members faced profanity and personal attacks in the face of outrage over the homelessness crisis.
In March 2021, public comment sessions were again limited to 15 minutes, and the public-comment portion has been absent from City Council meetings since the July 26 meeting as a precaution against further YouTube discipline.
And the council decided last week that City Council meetings, along with other city boards and commissions, will continue to meet online as the COVID-19 delta variant surges across Whatcom County.
YouTube restores meeting
YouTube restored the July 12 City Council meeting after an inquiry by The Bellingham Herald prompted officials at the Google-owned online video-sharing service to review its decision.
But the July 12 meeting video remained offline, along with several others that were deleted by the city.
City officials only recently were able to contact a YouTube official and get assurances about exemptions for content that violates YouTube rules regarding medical misinformation because of the meeting’s overall educational value or public benefit, said city of Bellingham spokeswoman Janice Keller.
“These communications with YouTube’s representatives appear to reduce our risk for using our YouTube channels,” Keller said. “So in light of this, our concerns are reduced.”
Even so, allowing regular public comment could violate YouTube policies, said Alan Marriner, city attorney.
“If we resume public comment as we have previously, we increase our risk with YouTube. We definitely do. There’s less risk if we have a different model of public comment,” Marriner told the council.
