Merced City Council to begin virtual participation protocol Monday. What it means
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- Merced City Council will test newly adopted hybrid public participation rules on Monday.
- Residents can use an online form to request telephonic participation or sign up to speak.
- The council may remove disruptive teleconference participants to protect meetings.
Monday’s Merced City Council meeting will mark the first test of the council’s newly adopted rules governing how the public can participate in meetings.
The change comes in response to California Senate Bill 707, which was signed into law last year and requires legislative bodies to permanently establish processes for hybrid public participation, among other updates to the state’s open-meeting law, the Brown Act.
Merced residents can now request to join City Council meetings via telephone through an online form on the city’s website. The form can also be used to sign up in advance to speak in person at council meetings.
For those who prefer to use the old system, the green request-to-speak cards will still be available at the Civic Center and can be submitted manually to the deputy city clerk.
Additionally, members of the public who have submitted an online form will receive an email four hours before the meeting with a reminder about any items for which they submitted comments.
In order to streamline meetings, teleconference participants will speak first during each item for public comment, and then in-person speakers will get their turn.
While the law will make it easier for residents to join public meetings, once concern it has raised across the state is the possibility of increased disruptions and so-called “Zoom bombings.”
To protect against disruption, the law authorizes legislative bodies to remove disruptive individuals from teleconference calls. Disruption is constituted by behavior that disturbs, impedes or renders infeasible the orderly conduct of the meeting.
In an effort to share this information widely, the city of Merced has posted about the changes to public meeting participation in a Facebook post and has announced that it will post QR codes in the Civic Center meeting room during future meetings.
“Staff is committed to do everything we can to make this as smooth a transition as possible, but we do understand that this is new to our city, (and) this is new to all cities in California,” said Assistant City Clerk Jennifer Parsley at the June 15 council meeting. “So we just ask for grace and patience with us.”
