The public input section of the Pima County Board of Supervisors’ meetings will now be limited to one hour in an attempt to quell the often volatile and time-consuming sessions that right-wing speakers have dominated for several months.
Supervisor Rex Scott presented a motion to limit the part of the meeting where members of the audience can directly address the board to one hour unless a majority of the board votes to extend it. If 20 or more people request to speak, each person’s time will be shortened from three to two minutes. The motion passed 3-2 on Tuesday with Supervisors Sharon Bronson and Steve Christy opposing the move. The new policy goes into effect at the next board meeting, June 20.
Currently, all those who sign up for call to the audience are allowed to speak for 3 minutes, which has recently created hours-long public input segments. Some speakers have made remarks causing warnings from Board Chair Adelita Grijalva or interventions from the sergeant at arms at the board’s chambers. One member was banned from the audience for her comments, but was allowed to return before the original three-month suspension lapsed.
Grijalva has made a point to start each call to the audience item by reciting the board’s rules: “Any person making personal or impertinent or slanderous remarks” or who “becomes boisterous” while addressing the board can be removed by the sergeant at arms with her direction.
The speakers are often from the Pima County GOP party and speak out against pandemic-related mandates, the county’s border policy and the actions of Democratic supervisors.
“For the last several months, officers of the county Republican Party and their precinct representatives have acted in a coordinated fashion to make use of this time,” Scott said, adding that the members are easily identifiable as they cite their names and titles before speaking and make similar arguments at each meeting. “Will this item prevent any of them from speaking at future meetings? It will not. What it will do is prevent a political party from monopolizing a public meeting to serve its own partisan ends.”
Scott pointed out many local governing and school boards limit time for call to the public, including Tucson City Council, the Pima Community College Governing Board and the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board.
The Pima County GOP called on its members to attend Tuesday’s meeting and “stand together” against the proposal to limit call to the audience. The Tucson Crime Free Coalition, a group raising awareness about the harms homelessness poses to businesses, also sent out a request for its members to email supervisors asking them to vote no on the item.
Many audience members on Tuesday spoke against the action, arguing it’s an unnecessary restriction on free speech. Pima County GOP Chair Dave Smith told the board: “We need to think what is the nature of freedom of speech? Because if I have to please you, that makes you my master, not my political leaders,” and mocked the idea that he’s pulling together a coordinated effort to monopolize call to the audience.
But while Scott pointed to a concerted effort among Republicans to take over the meetings, Supervisor Christy, the board’s sole Republican, said call to the audience wouldn’t pose an issue “If it had not been for supervisor Heinz’s irresponsible behavior,” pointing to a time during peak COVID-19 cases when the supervisor and hospital physician interrupted speakers who were providing vaccine disinformation and referred to people who don’t get COVID-19 vaccines as “murderers.”
Supervisor Sharon Bronson, the other dissenting vote, said “I think we got it right by allowing people to come and speak to us, and just because … other jurisdictions do it differently doesn’t make it correct.”
Grijalva said people often tell her “I’m so embarrassed of what’s going on at your board meetings, that is not representative of Pima County.”
“I do think that it’s difficult, in this position, to try to change anyone’s behavior if that’s the way they’ve been speaking for a long time,” she said.
Grijalva added that taking over Bronson’s seat as board chair in January, “was a little rough for me personally because I knew there were some things that we had to change.” Upon taking the position, the chair said she hoped to make call to the audience more welcoming.
Call to the audience became more raucous in March after a speaker received a three-month ban from board meetings after making “slanderous remarks,” according to a letter from the Pima County Attorney’s Office. The board later reversed the ban and asked for further legal advice.
The speaker, Shirley Requard, called on Chief Civil Deputy Samuel Brown “to look into possibly filing pedophilia charges against Matt Heinz” and told the board she believed an individual in his video feed was not of a “pubescent” age. The remarks stemmed from a January meeting when a man wearing a Speedo-like swimsuit appeared in the background of Heinz’s video feed. The supervisor, who was attending the meeting remotely during a Caribbean cruise, has said that the man in the now-viral video is a 24-year-old friend.
Heinz responded to the situation in an opinion piece for the Star, writing, “As a gay man, I know what that word (pedophile) is code for — it is a loud, piercing dog whistle for homophobia.”
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