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City council vows to condemn hate speech at meetings, still exploring procedural changes

By Lucas González

Posted May 1, 2024

The Bloomington City Council is still exploring possible changes to its processes for public comment following hate speech at its April 3 meeting. (Alex Eady, WTIU/WFIU News)

The Bloomington City Council is still exploring possible changes to its processes for public comment but has committed to condemning hate speech at its meetings.

The council held a work session Tuesday to discuss this topic following hate speech at its April 3 meeting, when it passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Councilors condemned the hate speech that night, but not until late in the meeting. They were criticized for not doing so sooner.

Council President Isabel Piedmont-Smith said the council will now immediately condemn any hateful comments.

“I think that we’ve established that the president or somebody else can immediately rebuke hate speech,” Piedmont-Smith said. “I don’t think we can only rebuke hate speech if we’ve passed a specific resolution against it. I think we can just say, ‘That is hate speech, and we do condemn it, or I condemn it.’”

Members said they also want to reduce commenters’ time limit to three minutes for public comment on items not on the council agenda. The current limit is five minutes.

Changing this would require an update to city code.

Legally, what’s considered hate speech is subjective — and the council cannot prevent a commenter from speaking based purely on the content of their speech, according to Council Attorney Stephen Lucas.

The council does have rules against making comments that threaten violence or are irrelevant to specific pieces of legislation, however.

“We want to make sure that whatever rules we do have comply with the First Amendment, that they are applied equally and fairly, and they don’t restrict speech more than necessary to achieve whatever legitimate goals we may have,” Lucas previously said.

The hate speech on April 3 came from commenters on Zoom, who espoused racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic and anti-LGBTQ_+ beliefs. Lucas said the council had received a suggestion to disallow Zoom comments.

City Clerk Nicole Bolden, who previously called for changes to the council’s public comment processes, said this would raise concerns over accessibility.

“If you’re only offering (public comment) to people who are in the room at that time, you’re cutting out huge swathes of people who can’t be there — people who may have mobility issues, or transportation issues, or childcare issues or work issues,” Bolden said.

Council members discussed possibly requiring Zoom commenters to verify their identity or submit a password to join a meeting. A point was later raised that online comment and in-person comment should be treated equally.

Lucas said state law does not require the council to allow members of the public to participate electronically — but that if it does, it should treat both types of commenters equally.

The council also contemplated mandating that commenters register online, state their full names when commenting, and provide proof of residence in Monroe County. It made no decisions on these suggestions, however.

Other suggestions included hosting a recurring town hall-style meeting that would allow for conversational interactions between councilors and their constituents, and bringing back regular committee of the whole meetings, which allowed members of the public to comment on upcoming legislation without the council voting on it.

Piedmont-Smith said the committee of the whole, as it was run before, did not allow for “back-and-forth” style interactions with members of the public she would like to see.