On the front page of the paper VDT today County Manager Joe Pritchard
proposes further restrictions on citizens in public County Commission
meetings:
“We cannot stop anybody from taking video of a session; but we can limit them to one area; it’s distracting to us and to citizens to have somebody running around the session trying to get different angles,” said Joe Pritchard, county manager.The only person I’ve seen running around the session trying to get different angles is Paige Dukes, County Clerk. Will she now be prohibited from coming out from behind the bar to take pictures of awards and such?
Why they can’t stop anybody from taking video, according to Georgia law, O.C.G.A. § 50-14-1-c.:
“Visual, sound, and visual and sound recording during open meetings shall be permitted.”Some courts do put some restrictions on visual recordings, such as prohibiting pictures of jurors. But the Lowndes County Commission is not a court. It is the only elected body for the entire county, and thus the only public forum at which citizens can peacefully assemble to petition their local government for redress of county-wide grievances.
Does the Commission really want to put more restrictions on citizens in its meetings,
even though a constitutional scholar is questioning
the constitutionality of
the rules they recently passed?
Rules which limit the number of speakers in Citizens Wishing to be Heard to 10
and
say the Commission can declare subjects closed, among other
questionable restrictions?
Rules that are already
under legal review by the NAACP?
In the same article:
“Our citizen complaints are insignificant compared to what they were ten to 12 years ago, but we need to continue to fine-tune the process,” said Paige Dukes, Lowndes County Information officer.If citizen complaints are insignificant, it sounds to me like the Commission is trying to solve a non-problem, and thereby creating a new problem.
Further:
Safety concerns about the citizens-to-be-heard section of commission meetings was also discussed.
Remember this invention of new restrictions on citizens happened
just after
Chairman Paulk turned a simple event invitation into an interrogation,
alleging he’d received a threatening letter.
The
actual letter contains nothing more threatening than the phrase “a wakeup call”.
I’ve been attending Commission meetings for years, and the only safety
problem I’ve ever seen was when the Chairman made what many observers interpreted as
a veiled threat to arrest the inviter. Given what I’ve heard about local jail conditions, that would be a safety concern for the citizen.
Now that the county government has dug itself into a PR hole, maybe they should stop digging!
A much simpler solution would be to have the county itself
video its own meetings and make them available on the web,
as I recommended to them on 25 January 2011:
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
If the Lowndes County Commission instead keeps adding restrictions to what citizens can do in their meetings, people may start to wonder what the Commission is hiding and why they are afraid of the citizens.
-jsq
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