Spokane council considers changing its rules, including limiting public testimony

The Spokane City Council is considering placing greater limits on the public’s time to speak before a vote, among other changes to its rules and procedures.

Many of the new rules being considered are intended to increase transparency: creating a single landing page on the city website for the public to review more information related to upcoming or past council actions, giving council members more flexibility to schedule community listening sessions in their districts, and creating a mechanism to force a pause on ordinances that don’t include all of the technically required – and frequently forgotten – information regarding their funding, community impact and so forth.

The council requires all ordinances, resolutions and other matters before them to answer questions such as “What impacts would the proposal have on historically excluded communities?” or “How will data be collected … to ensure it is the right solution?”

Despite that requirement, these questions are regularly unanswered before an item gets a vote, an omission that drew community ire recently when activists protested against a federal police hiring grant earlier this month. Opponents felt like the police department and city council were obfuscating the vote’s impacts on the immigrant community, a perception not aided by the blank boxes where the police were supposed to fill out answers to such questions.

The council is considering mechanisms to force a pause on any item that didn’t have this information filled out.

Some of the rule changes being considered would affect public testimony at council meetings, either by allowing more of it or, in one case, severely restricting it.

Currently, people can sign up to speak about any given item on that night’s agenda. If there are multiple items they wish to address in a given night, they get a new time slot before every item; at times, the same person has spoken a dozen times in a given night.

Councilwoman Kate Telis proposed limiting this testimony to a single block at the beginning of the meeting. If someone wanted to address a dozen items that night, they would have a single three -minute block to address every item.

Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke and Councilman Zack Zappone expressed some support for the change. Councilman Michael Cathcart, on the other hand, called it “B.S.”

“This is one I would fall on my sword pretty darn hard on,” he said. “The idea that we’re going to restrict people from commenting on individual ordinances and resolutions, to me, is just a slap to the face to the public.”

It’s not unheard of for multiple controversial items to land on the same legislative meeting, frequently with the same speakers waiting for sometimes hours to speak for a few minutes on each of those items. Limiting their time to address these items sends the message that the council doesn’t care about the public’s input, Cathcart said.

Telis disagreed.

“We’re not taking away in any way, shape or form, the right for a person to comment on each agenda item,” Telis said. “We are simply asking them to be very efficient with their time.”

She said the council’s meetings can stretch late into the night – in one case, as late as 1 a.m. the next morning – preventing the average person from being able to stay to comment on an item that was important to them.

“And as a mother of young children, I can tell you the amount of times that I sat out there and testified, and it would have been a lot more if it had been a public testimony at the beginning of the night so I could be home with my family,” Telis said.

Cathcart said late meetings are a function of the council’s choices to hold multiple controversial items on the same night.

Klitzke said Telis’ approach to testimony would allow more people to speak at council meetings and that anyone whose testimony was limited by the change could simply email council members. Zappone seemed to echo that sentiment, arguing that state law didn’t require the council to allow any oral testimony and that no one had a right to speak before the dais that was being infringed.

Zappone also said relatively few people would be affected negatively by the change. Of all of the time slots to speak before the council reserved by the public in 2025, roughly 50% were used by the same 10 people. Of all people who spoke at a council meeting in the same year, 60% only spoke once.

A vote on changes to the council’s rules is scheduled for Feb. 23.