This spring the Chelsea City Council rewrote its own rules. Among the changes: the time a resident gets to speak at a council meeting was cut from four minutes to three. The council made that decision during the year in which more residents turned out to speak than in any other, and they turned out over cuts to the school budget.
The rewrite
The rules revision was the first project of Council President Roberto Jimenez-Rivera’s term. He filed the order in January calling the Rules and Administration subcommittee together, chaired it through meetings in January and February, and brought the result to a special meeting on March 3 that ran from 6:34 to 10:09 at night, going through the rules one at a time. The subcommittee’s final package came back through a Conference subcommittee report on March 17.
Most of it is housekeeping of the sort that only matters when something goes wrong: who chairs when the president and vice president are both absent, in what order motions are taken, what happens when a councillor doubts a voice vote and asks for a roll call. The subcommittee also reordered the precedence of motions and added the ones the old rules omitted, including points of order, appeals from the chair’s decision, and parliamentary inquiry.
Some proposals were about the council’s own endurance: an 11 p.m. hard stop, a four-minute limit on councillors’ own speaking time, dropping routine second readings, requiring the City Manager to appear in person to explain requests, and assigning seats by lot.
The public comment change
Rule 43 governs the public comment session. The updated language, proposed by the Council Clerk, does several things at once.
It requires sign-in sheets with name, address and the topics a speaker intends to address. It reduces time per speaker from four minutes to three. It provides that a speaker using an interpreter is timed only when the speaker is talking, not during translation. It encourages large groups to consolidate or choose a spokesperson. It bars speakers from using their time to promote or oppose candidates for office, or for commercial or private gain. And it prohibits yielding time to another person.
The interpreter provision is a genuine improvement and, in a city where nearly half of residents were born outside the United States, not a small one. Without it, a resident speaking through an interpreter effectively gets half the time of a resident who speaks English. Chelsea fixed that.
The rest cuts the other way. Three minutes instead of four is a 25 percent reduction. The sign-in requirement asks residents to state their address and their subject in writing before speaking to their government. The ban on yielding time means a group of neighbors cannot pool their minutes to let the one person who knows the issue best make the full argument.
The context that makes it awkward
Here is what public speaking actually looked like in Chelsea this year, from the minutes.
On January 28, one speaker. On February 9, none. On March 2, none. On April 27, the session ran about two minutes. On May 4, it opened and closed inside a minute.
Then on June 8 it ran 38 minutes, almost entirely on inclusionary zoning, the ordinance governing how much affordable housing developers must build or pay for. That was the night residents showed up. Two weeks later the council raised the developer buyout fee to $275,000 per unit on a 6-to-5 vote, rejecting the City Manager’s proposal to cut it.
The heaviest turnout of the year came earlier, over the school budget, when a School Committee member told the council that 70 positions were slated to be cut district-wide and described a hearing that drew 200 people. In the same written comment she noted that the city’s online comment form was not working.
So the pattern is: almost nobody speaks at a Chelsea council meeting, except when something enormous is at stake, and then a great many people do. The four-minute rule was costing the council almost nothing in the ordinary course. The three-minute rule will only ever bind on the nights when the room is full.
What the council was solving for
In fairness, the council was not inventing a problem. Its meetings run long, and the March 3 rules meeting itself ran past ten o’clock. The 11 p.m. proposal and the shorter speaking limits belong to the same impulse, which is to finish the public’s business at an hour when the people doing it are still awake. Cutting councillors’ own speaking time to four minutes was part of the same package, so the body did apply the discipline to itself.
And three minutes is the common standard. Plenty of Massachusetts cities use it, some use two.
But the sequence is what a resident would notice. The council reduced public speaking time in March. The public showed up in force in June. And a councillor is now proposing to strike Rule 31, which requires two readings at two meetings before the council confirms the City Manager’s appointments to boards and commissions, a rule whose entire function is to slow an appointment down long enough for someone to object. That order, from District 6 Councillor Giovanni Recupero, was on the September 14 agenda.
The council’s Charter Review Committee is examining citizen participation this fall. It has a concrete case study in its own rules: a body that made it modestly harder to speak to it, in the year its residents most wanted to, while also being the body that fixed the interpreter clock. Both of those are in the same report.