Citizen input has been an elegant, effective and, yes, efficient part of City business for over 100 years and counting. So why did City Council recently move to curtail public comment in their Monday night meetings?

First in a two-part series by Laura Lance
Tuesday, July 30, 2024

On Thursday, June 20, 2024, Aiken City Council released its agenda for the June 24th meeting. City Council meeting agendas are prepared by City Manager Stuart Bedenbaugh and, as required under City Code¹, they are publicly posted by noon on Friday before the Monday meeting. 

On the agenda were eleven public hearings, which promised a very busy meeting. The last hearing on the agenda was a plain-faced item titled, “First Reading of an Ordinance to Amend Section 2.64 of the Aiken City Code.” Unlike the other items on the agenda, this one was devoid of description.²

Many readers might skim past this nondescript title, and that is exactly what happened until Sunday afternoon, when the conspicuous lack of description drew the curiosity of one seasoned agenda reader. Digging into the agenda package, she found the description on pages 341-348. Here, she learned that this proposed ordinance was set to reduce and restrict public input, inquiry and participation in public meetings. She posted notice to the local community via social media:

ABOVE: Screenshot of Katy Lipscomb’s June 23rd social media post, which was accompanied by screenshots³ of pages 341-348 of the meeting agenda package. Click for larger view.

If not for her notice, it is unlikely that anyone would have known the importance of attending the Monday night meeting, much less been compelled to stay into the third and fourth hours of the meeting in order to give comment on this innocuous-sounding agenda item. 

A number of questions beg answers, among them:

• Why was this important public hearing cloaked behind a vague and incomplete title?
• Why was this item tacked onto the end of a long list of public hearings?
• Why was the item’s description effectively hidden from view by burying it on page 341 of the agenda?
• Who proposed this amendment?

And Why?

According to statements made by two of the six council members who spoke⁴ during the Monday night “First Reading of an Ordinance to Amend Section 2.64 of the Aiken City Code,” the City body was driven by a need for “efficiency.” Toward this end, attendees were advised that City Council meetings are business meetings and that business should go first. There were also concerns that non-agenda comments were causing the meetings to run long.

Councilwoman Kay Brohl suggested that the non-agenda public comments had prevented those who’d come to do business with the City from the opportunity to get up and speak. Council member Ed Girardeau, speaking on the history of citizen comments, said, “There was never a time when the public was allowed to just get up and talk and say whatever they wanted to say.”

Neither of these statements is true. Part Two in this article series will crunch the numbers on Councilwoman Brohl’s statement. Part One will address both the history and the history-making dimensions of non-agenda citizen comments, which have been a part of City Council meetings going back as far as 1842 .

100 Years Ago

A modern reader might feel a creeping sense of deja vu reading the minutes and newspaper accounts of Aiken City Council meetings over the past century. In the 1920s, a City Council meeting could run for three hours, and the people’s voice was no small part of the proceedings.

In addition to comments and petitions from year-round residents, City Council received letters and telegrams from Winter Colony residents who weighed in from afar. The women of the citizen-based Civic League, some of whom hailed from the Winter Colony, were also vocal and regular participants in City government. Citizen concerns of the day included stormwater runoff, sewer infrastructure, parking issues, public restrooms, requests for street lights, planting trees, beautifying parks, and the gathering of petitions to protest the destruction of trees and parks.

Some of the benefits reaped from the citizen input brought to City Council in the 1920s are still with us today: 

• A citizens petition requesting sidewalk improvements on the north side of South Boundary.
• A citizen request from Aiken Graded School to use part of Sumter Street and Abbeville Avenue to make a playground and pool for the neighborhood children. Permission was granted, and this property is now part of the Smith Hazel Recreation Center and Park.
• A successful citizens petition to prevent the destruction of the entire Richland Avenue parkway between Morgan and York Streets during the paving of US Highway One.

BELOW: The drive down Richland Avenue would be a different experience today, had citizens of 1920s Aiken not risen up with petition and protest to oppose the full-scale destruction of the iconic Richland Avenue parkways.

Those off-agenda petitions and requests of the 1920s were the direct efforts by citizens to bring Council’s attention to wants, needs, issues and concerns that might not otherwise be heard. Today, these issues and concerns are brought to City Council during the part of the meeting titled, “Nonagenda Items from the Public.”

Tomato, Tomatoh: Non-Agenda Items vs. Petitions and Requests

The term, “Nonagenda Items from the Public,” appears to be a 21st-century invention. Or possibly a 1980s invention. No one knows. The date and authorship of this ordinance remain mysteries that are stubborn to be solved. Research by numerous individuals and City offices is ongoing and has, so far, come up empty. What is known is that, at some point in the 1970s or later, an ordinance was written to create two nonagenda public comment periods. However, and for reasons unknown, the ordinance was never enforced..

Previous to the “nonagenda public comments” nomenclature, Aiken citizens came before Council during was termed the “Petitions and Requests” part of the agenda.  While the terms, petitions and requests have been fixtures in City Council meetings for over 100 years, they didn’t become a formal part of the lexicon until 1955. This is the year that Aiken adopted the Council-Manager form of government, a form of government proclaimed to the Aiken community as one that would meet the need for “effective citizen participation in city affairs” and would be “more efficient than other forms and more responsive to the will of the people.”

The first City Council agenda in July 1955 under this new form of government included an item titled “Petitions and Requests,” described as “Consideration of requests from citizens present who desire to address the Council.”

Citizen requests were often, but not always, brought in writing. This may have been more a matter of practicality than formality as, in those days and for many years prior, matters brought by citizens were often settled on the spot by Council vote. Having a written record of the request likely streamlined the process. This appears to have been the case, for instance, with the 1928 decision to grant Aiken Graded School the use of Abbeville and Sumter Streets for a playground and pool for neighborhood children.

ABOVE: Screenshot from the August 13, 1928 Aiken City Council meeting minutes. Click for larger view.

The building of the pool was a different matter. The City had already built a pool for White people in 1921, but a pool had yet to be built to accommodate Aiken’s Black citizens. This matter would be brought to Council several times over the next 3 decades, including a  1940 City Council meeting when, according to the local newspaper, “a large group of colored citizens appeared before council to appeal for a swimming pool for the colored children of the city.” In 1954, the City finally built a pool for Aiken’s Black citizens.

ABOVE: During the summer of 1954, and in advance of the City building a new pool for White people, the City Council approved funding for the construction of a pool to accommodate Black people, which came to be named the Smith Hazel Pool. (Source: Aiken Standard & Review, August 12, 1954). Click for larger view.

Throughout the 1950s, “Petitions and Requests” was the first item on the agenda following the approval of the minutes. During the 1960s, “Petitions and Requests” appeared at different places in the agenda, disappearing entirely for some years. The agenda, itself, even disappeared from the record for some of these years, finally reappearing in 1970.

New Rules

On July 12, 1976, the topic of citizen input was addressed by ordinance in City Code in a section titled, “Appearance of Citizens,” which stated:

“Any citizen of the municipality shall be entitled to an appearance before council at any regular meeting concerning any municipal matter, with the exception of personnel matters. Persons desiring to speak, must notify the City Manager prior to the beginning of the meeting. This may be waived by the presiding officer.”

From this point on, the provision for off-agenda citizen input appears to have commenced as in decades before, during the Petitions and Requests part of the agenda. As in years prior, some citizens appeared in person, others not; some delivered their words in writing, others in speech.

Advance, written petitions and requests, which were sometimes added to the agenda, can be found in the archives of City Council agendas, whereas the records of citizens who appeared before Council with nonagenda comment, with no advance written notice, can be found in the archives of City Council meeting minutes.

The meeting minutes from a March 1983 meeting, for instance, show comments from four citizens who appeared before Council during Petitions and Requests. If there was advance, written notice of their appearance, it was not made part of the meeting record. Their requests concerned issues of stormwater, streetlights, road hazards and sewer rats:

ABOVE: Screenshots from the March 14, 1983 Aiken City Council meeting minutes describing four off-agenda citizen comments. Click to enlarge.

Regardless of the method of delivery — and regardless of the presence or absence of an ordinance stating official policy on citizen input — it appears that the City of Aiken always provided an avenue for people to bring off-agenda concerns and requests to Council. 

That is, until sometime during the 1980s, when the tradition of hearing off-agenda comments in “Petitions and Requests” devolved into a system again ruled by habit, not policy — a system where only immediate city business was on the agenda, and requests to even speak on a non-agenda item had to be made in advance. This occurred, paradoxically, during the same time frame it is believed the ordinance for “Nonagenda Items from the Public” was written into City Code but never enacted.

In 2022, the absence of this “Nonagenda items from the Public” comment period was brought to Council’s attention by a number of citizens. Afterward, and without fanfare, the item was added to the agenda for the first time, as reported in the article, Aiken City Council Reimplements Citizen Input Rules.

Today, less than two years later, City Council has made a move — in the interest of “efficiency” — to change City Code in ways that will reduce and restrict citizen input.

This seems a perplexing thing to do, since the record over the past two years shows that the inclusion of the nonagenda comment period has actually brought the City closer to realizing its once-promoted ideals of “effective citizen participation” and of a government “more responsive to the will of the people.”

NEXT: The Citizens’ Voice at City Council Meetings: Part Two

_____________________

REFERENCES:

1. Screenshot of Section 2-65 of the City Code. Click for larger view.

2. Screenshots from the June 24, 2024 agenda. Public hearings with proper descriptions are highlighted in yellow. The public hearing without description is highlighted in pink. Click for larger views.

3. Screenshots of pages 341-348 in the June 24, 2024 City Council meeting agenda. Click for larger views.

4. Starting point for statement made by six Aiken City Council members on First Reading of an Ordinance to Amend Section 2.64 of the Aiken City Code.” during the June 24, 2024 City Council meeting.