Some ground rules needed for County Council Zoom meetings

Published 1:30 am Saturday, June 20, 2020

On June 10, I participated in the public testimony portion of the County Council meeting. It was quite interesting for a number of reasons. There were, at the peak, about 450 people on the call. That is amazing. Over 100 spoke, and testimony took nearly four hours.

The county council members did not have their cameras on at all times. I even mentioned that in my statement, that I expected that they would extend the courtesy of being visible at their own meeting. Imagine if at a council meeting, they put a big curtain in front of the dais so the public couldn’t tell if they were listening or talking amongst themselves or even if they left the room. I would hope that in the future they be required to be visibly present at their own meeting.

The other decorum issue that really riled me had to do with one speaker (at least I only heard one during the two hours I was attending), who used such foul language you couldn’t print her remarks in this newspaper. The president of the council should have turned off her mic (much easier to do on Zoom, that in the council chambers) and admonished her that her language was not allowed at council meetings, and if she continued, she would lose her opportunity to speak. The rest of the speakers, for all perspectives, were extremely polite, some more heated than others, more passionate, but no one abused others by that kind of vulgar tirade.

It is a privilege to be able to have so many people “attend” a public hearing. Many of them, including me, might not have made it to the county administration building in “normal” times.

Mary Kay Voss

Mill Creek