The Aurora City Council has tightened its rules for public input at its meetings, doing away with the option to call in with comments two weeks after a caller delivered a racist and antisemitic tirade that was broadcast in the chamber.
Mayor Mike Coffman said before Monday’s vote that allowing live phone-in participation leaves the door open to vile content that the First Amendment does not permit the council, a government body, to curtail.
“Somebody can call in from anywhere in the country and say whatever they want, and there’s nothing we can do,” he said. “I think showing up at a council meeting is sufficient.”
In recent years, several Colorado cities — including Wheat Ridge, Lakewood and Durango — have been “zoom-bombed” by people making offensive remarks from afar while shrouded in anonymity. The Anti-Defamation League has tracked the verbal assaults nationwide, citing a group that calls itself the City Council Death Squad as being behind some of them.
Aurora also imposed stricter sign-up procedures for public speakers on Monday. It will now require people wishing to address the council to sign up in person with the city clerk between 5 p.m. and 6:20 p.m. on the day of a council meeting. Their name, address, phone number and email address will have to be provided to the city.
The resolution will limit total public comment on agenda items at a meeting to 30 minutes, except for comments taken on items scheduled for public hearings.
Councilwoman Crystal Murillo said the new rules were “an overreaction.” She was one of two council members to vote no on Monday. Seven council members voted in favor of the new public input regulations.
“We keep reducing the opportunities for the community to speak,” Murillo said.
But Councilman Curtis Gardner, who brought the resolution before the council, said the new rules were reasonable.
“In fact, most cities across the country have rules in place on time, residency requirements and more to ensure residents have an opportunity to be heard,” he said. “Due to recent similar events regarding racist behavior on call-in lines, several other cities have taken similar steps.”
Aurora’s council meetings have been raucous affairs of late, with dozens of residents and activists angrily addressing the city’s elected leaders over the May killing of 37-year-old Kilyn Lewis by an Aurora SWAT officer. Lewis, a Black man who was being sought on suspicion of attempted first-degree murder, was unarmed at the time of the shooting.
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Over the summer, the Aurora council retreated to a back room on several occasions to complete meetings that protesters disrupted. On Monday, the meeting — from start to finish — was held remotely.
LaRonda Jones, Lewis’ mother, decried the elimination of call-in comments from the public during Monday’s meeting.
“I can’t physically be there every single time at every single meeting,” she said. “(Kilyn’s) life matters. His story matters. And yet it feels like your City Council is determined to shut us out as if my presence and my pain is inconvenient.”
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