This Land is Your Land....

“You’ve got to exert your ownership over the place you live in, or you won’t have that place.  That’s what that song is about.” 
- Bruce Springsteen on Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” 


We may be forced into singing at next week’s Lindsay City Council meeting:  our City Manager has once again reduced our rights to participate in city council meetings with the full blessing of (but without a decision by) the Council.
It’s not the first time.  After the Feb. 14, 2012 meeting, where I’d insisted that the public had a right to ask for the removal of items from the consent calendar according to wording on the agenda, they took that wording out.  
By the March 13, 2012 meeting, they’d taken out another sentence, this one from the paragraph defining public participation on the agenda packet cover sheet: “To place an item on the Council agenda, you must contact the City Clerk or City Manager’s Department before 12:00 noon on the Wednesday immediately preceding the meeting to have the item placed on the agenda.”  After I’d asked for months about how to get an item on the agenda, that missing sentence was finally replaced in the June 12 packet cover sheet with this one: “If a member of the public wishes for an item to be placed on an agenda, he/she may also ask at this time (during the public comment period) but the Council will make the ultimate decision whether to place a requested item on a future agenda and is under no obligation to do so.”
On that same cover sheet I discovered the most recent disappeared/replaced sentence, which eliminates the right to speak to agenda items when they come up for discussion.  The missing sentence said:  “Those who wish to be heard on matters on the agenda should indicate their desire to speak when the item is ready for discussion.”  It had been replaced with “Members of the public are welcome to make their comments during the public comment portion of the agenda, as this is the place for public participation per the Brown Act.” This completely limits public participation in council meetings to the three minute public comment period (except during public hearings).  
Whether the Brown Act says that or not is a matter of interpretation, however.  The League of California Cities’ fine guide to the Brown Act says “Every agenda for a regular meeting must allow members of the public to speak on any item of interest, so long as the item is within the subject matter jurisdiction of the legislative body.  Further, the public must be allowed to speak on a specific item of business before or during the legislative body’s consideration of it.”
Our city’s attorneys seem to be interpreting the Brown Act’s word “before” as “way before,” like during the public comment period.  But if the League of California Cities thought that, they wouldn’t have used the word Further.
When they Nazi’s took away the Jews’ rights, they didn’t do it all at once.  They did it one small piece at a time, quietly, until it was too late for anyone to protest the dehumanizing effect of being without citizenship.  Come exert your ownership over this place we live in - let your presence be felt at Tuesday’s city council meeting.