After months of discourse surrounding public comments, the Chattanooga City Council will loosen its restrictions to allow more citizen feedback at meetings.
While the council has had several run-ins with public commenters acting outside of decorum this year, an October incident involving the police sparked significant changes in the public comment policy that passed late Tuesday.
During the council’s Oct. 8 voting meeting, local activist and 2021 District 8 city council candidate Marie Mott continued a streak of passionate interruptions at council meetings during a heartfelt call to action about several recent fatal shootings of young men in East Chattanooga, resulting in police being asked to escort her out of the meeting and the meeting being abruptly adjourned.
“How precious is our time that we can’t allow a few more people to speak?” District 6 Councilwoman Carol Berz said to her colleagues during a strategic planning session the next Tuesday. “People put us in office, and I think we should be listening to them.”
Mott was told before public comments that she, by name, was not allowed to speak during the meeting, having exceeded the council’s limit of two public comments by any person in a given 30-day time period. Mott chimed in from the audience during the gun violence discussion and was reprimanded by Erskine Oglesby in the most heated of the pair’s several similar disagreements about public comments in recent months.