HUNTINGTON BEACH : City May Reconsider Public Hearing Time

Three weeks after the City Council angered some residents by voting to hold public comments later during their meetings, Councilman Don MacAllister is planning to propose a compromise.

Under MacAllister’s plan, the public again would be allowed to address the council near the beginning of each meeting, as it had been before the council on March 23 narrowly agreed to change it.

But MacAllister is proposing to allow no more than 10 speakers before the scheduled public hearings, with public comments concluding after 30 minutes.

Other residents wishing to speak would have to wait until an additional comment section is held later in the evening, after the public hearings. The length of the second public comment section would be set by the council, but would be no longer than an hour.

Additionally, the plan would allow no more than five speakers to address a particular subject.

That aspect of his proposal would dramatically limit the number of speakers allowed to address the council. Frequently, a subject will attract at least a dozen speakers.

“We need to have better control of our meetings, but at the same time, we must be considerate of not only the public, but also those who have public hearings,” MacAllister wrote in a memo detailing his proposal.

MacAllister had planned to pitch the idea earlier this week when the council met. But because of the length of the meeting--which included two hours of public comments--his proposal was among a batch of council business that was deferred until April 20.

Because public comments have consumed increasingly large blocks of time at recent council meetings, Councilman Earle Robitaille proposed the idea to hold the comments after the scheduled public hearings, rather than before.

Many residents have since berated council members for adopting Robitaille’s proposal, charging that delaying comments until late in the evening was a maneuver to curtail public discussion.

MacAllister’s plan similarly has been greeted coolly by the city’s largest citizens’ organization.

“We feel there should be no restriction on the amount of time or the number of people who should be allowed to speak,” said David Sullivan, president of Huntington Beach Tomorrow, which claims to represent 1,000 residents. “It’s a right, and the citizens should be allowed to exercise that right.”