Change to St. Clair County Board bylaws prevents yielding time in public comment

Amid a controversial public health mandate in early 2022, public comment sessions at St. Clair County Board of Commissioners meetings stretched on for hours.

Under new bylaws for the board, however, a contributing reason for that — residents being able to yield time to other speakers — would not be allowed.

County commissioners signed off on changes to their bylaws Thursday night, updating the set of rules for the first time in years. Some of those elevated references to Robert’s Rules of Order and the Michigan Open Meetings Act, among a host of small adjustments.

While the update retains the traditional three-minute maximum per person in public comment, it also entailed a proposed change from Commissioner Steve Simasko to prevent speakers from passing their three minutes to others at the podium when their time runs out.

A big reason for the update, Simasko said, was because commissioners want to ensure they hear from a variety of residents.

“Otherwise, they (can) give half an hour to one person. So, I suggested it, they adopted it, I think it’s important,” he said after Thursday’s meeting. “There’s not a lot of bodies that allow it that I know of. I want meetings to be orderly. I want them to be open and transparent, to be beneficial and meaningful. (If) we probably have people yield six of (their) times, what would we have?”

“It’s not a diatribe. It’s not a thesis,” he said. “It’s state your three minutes and let the next person talk.”

The practice of yielding time became popular last year when hundreds of residents flooded board meetings after a temporary school mask order was issued by the county health department as a COVID mitigation tool.

Individuals during public comment often ran the clock on their three minutes, then accepted the time of someone else who’d filled out a card to speak to continue — in some cases, multiple times.

After a speaker briefly refused to leave the podium that January, having not been offered yielded time by another, county attorney Gary Fletcher encouraged commissioners to address the rules.

On Thursday, Fletcher said it’d been a long time since the county board’s bylaws were updated either way — and that the changes were in part “for legal compliance” or to “reflect current practices” — but he reiterated that clarity on some of the public comment rules was needed.

Jorja Baldwin, who was reappointed to her role as the board’s vice chair Thursday, said she’d researched other language for public comment issues, such as for someone representing a larger group being granted a time slightly longer than three minutes — something that, ultimately, wasn’t in the update.

Still, the yielding of time from one speaker to one whose time had passed, she said, had seemed unfair at certain points last year.

“There may be people who have no intentions of ever speaking at all,” Baldwin said. “It’s just to have someone be able to have their longer piece that not everyone would get.”

More alterations to the bylaws were contributed to Simasko than any other official in drafts of the update.

A former commissioner returning to office after November’s election, he said he worked with Fletcher on some change proposals while a commissioner-elect. His sections also addressed other public comment mechanisms, such as written communication, as well as the resignation or removal of board officers, quorum specifications, and the addition of a preamble.

The preamble, Simasko said, was largely about setting a tone for the board and its role, “so people know where we’re coming from.”

Contact Jackie Smith at (810) 989-6270 or jssmith@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jackie20Smith.