In the Tuesday, Jan. 9, edition of the Butler Eagle, we learned about potential changes to public comment in Seven Fields that would once again recognize the essential role of the public in local government.

In 2018, the borough adopted a public comment policy for council meetings that requires anyone who wishes to speak to sign up at least three business days before the council meeting. At Monday’s meeting, Suzanne Mills, a former planning commission member, pointed out the problem with requiring three-business days’ notice — the agenda for meetings isn’t always out in time.

“I found this in the past to be problematic because often the agendas of the meeting are not necessarily published at a time that allows the public to properly respond,” she said.

As another part of the comment policy is that all speakers must address an agenda item, unless they get specific permission from the council, makes the advance notice policy a barrier to public participation.

The first recommendation discussed Monday, to reduce the notification time to 90 minutes instead of three days, would be a decent start but doesn’t go far enough. A much better choice would be another suggestion from Monday’s meeting: that members of the public should be allowed to sign up to speak when they arrive at the meeting.

Reasonable restrictions on public comments are understandable — local government needs to be able to get things done, so requiring speakers to be topical, respectful and concise is important. But restrictions on when members of the public must sign up, or requiring them to say what they want to talk about before the meeting not only limit the number of people who can participate, they also signal that the board making those rules don’t care very much about what the public has to say.

Based on the comments from Monday’s meeting, it appears that council members support allowing people to sign up to speak when they arrive at the meeting. That would be a very refreshing change, and would signal that the council understands how important public participation is for local government.

— JK