MALDEN — There is no policy in place if the public wants to address the Malden City Council at one of their meetings.
That is going to change with various councilors having differing opinions on how they should approach the issue. Although they agree that public comment is vital.
City Councilor-at-Large Debbie DeMaria spearheaded what has been described as a research project in an effort to determine what public comment format fits.
Her research yielded a proposal to elicit public comment early in the meeting, but it would be limited. The format would confine comments to 15 speakers with a two-minute limit on how long they speak.
“Why should we cut some member of the public off if they want to speak at a City Council meeting?” asked Councilor-at-Large David D’Arcangelo. “We want to hear from everyone and they should be able to speak as long as they would like to, within reason. This is why we’re a city. We are not town meeting with limits and time slots. Who’s going to keep the stopwatch if we adopt this plan? We’d definitely be on a slippery slope to curtailing our residents’ speech on that one.”
Several councilors urged giving the comment period a try.
“We have nothing in place now, we may as well implement this and then assess it,” said Ward 4 Councilor Ryan O’Malley. “Councilor DeMaria did do a lot of work on this.”
Ward 3 Councilor John Matheson spoke to the merits of a time limit for public comment.
“We’re quickly becoming a full-time City Council,” he said. “We are becoming much more busy with a very busy docket. There’s a lot of pressure being put on the quality of our time.”
Ward 5 Councilor Barbara Murphy also questioned how a time limit plan would be enforced.
“What if the first 15 people who want to speak are all on one side on an issue?” she said. “That would mean we would hear nothing from the other side. That could affect the city in a bad way. We would be the bad guys in that scenario.”
Matheson said research showed a variety of regulations regarding public comment at council meetings, including three neighboring communities: Everett, Melrose and Somerville, where no time is allotted at any meeting for residents to speak.
A 4-4 tie vote prevented a motion to institute the proposal on a trial basis for the remainder of 2017 from passing. DeMaria and Ward 8’s Jadeane Sica were absent. The Ward 6 councilor’s seat is vacant due to the resignation of former Councilor Neil Kinnon this summer.
