A recent change at Los Angeles City Hall prohibits the public from commenting during committee meetings remotely – under the new rules, feedback must be submitted through written comments or in-person.
What is a committee meeting?
There are about two dozen city council committees in Los Angeles focused on everything from the city’s budget to homelessness and animal control. These meetings are incubators for developing important policies before they reach the full council.
Why now
During the pandemic, public meetings from school boards to city council streamed online and allowed people to comment virtually or by phone due to Gov. Gavin Newson’s executive orders.
Reseda resident Jamie York, who also serves on her local neighborhood council, said she loved the convenience and tuned into so many virtual public meetings it’d be hard to count them off-hand.
“I live far from City Hall,” York said. “In order to be able to go there, it’s typically over an hour’s time commitment each way just to be able to speak for, at most, a few minutes.”
Now that California’s state of emergency is over, Los Angeles city council committee meetings are happening in person and not all of them are set up to allow telephonic comments, said Hugh Esten, the director of communications for Council President Paul Krekorian. In an effort to provide similar comment access for all committees, Krekorian recently decided to end the option for members to call in to some committee meetings.
“We are required to provide equal access to all committee meetings,” Esten said. “We can’t have some of them provide a form of access that the others don’t…
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