Is the City Council becoming too ‘chaotic’ for public speakers? Some Dallasites believe so

Charissa Terranova arrived at Dallas City Hall last Wednesday at 9:45 a.m., 15 minutes before the special-called meeting she’d signed up to speak at.

She was listed as speaker No. 36, and more than 130 people had signed up to address the council on the agenda item that could have funded repairs for the building, which needs at least $1 billion in maintenance according to at least one estimate. The meeting had drawn such a large crowd that every seat in the council chamber was full, and an overflow area was required.

Terranova, who holds a doctorate in modern architecture from Harvard, thought she was just the person the council needed to hear from before deliberating on the future of the I.M. Pei-designed brutalist building on Marilla Street.

She’d spent the days leading up to the meeting writing a three-minute speech and practicing her delivery, but in the end, she never gave the address. By the time the council welcomed the public speakers who’d signed up for that 10 a.m. meeting, it was nearly 5 p.m., and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd had dwindled to just a few dozen. After spending most of the day deliberating in executive session, which is closed to the public, a majority of the council voted not to fund the repairs. 

“I was number 36, and [when they called my name] I wasn’t there,” Terranova said. “I had come earlier in the day. I knew I had work meetings in the afternoon, but I assumed that this would have been over by noon or one at the latest.” 

Terranova is one of dozens who have expressed frustration after the June 10 meeting over the way public speakers were handled. 

A chief complaint is that the speakers last week were given only one minute to address the council; typically, they are allowed three. Some Dallasites argue that introducing public speakers hours after a meeting begins makes it impossible for working-class people or parents to address the council and violates the spirit of open meetings laws that guarantee the public the right to voice their opinions on public matters. 

Public testimony is guaranteed by the Texas Open Meetings Act. The law states that all members of the public who wish to address government entities have the right to do so during open meetings, and that governments should adopt “reasonable rules” to ensure that right is upheld. 

Dallas’ public speaker guidelines can be found in a multi-page packet, but they are vague. For instance, the rules state that “The mayor may impose more restrictive time limits on voting items for which a large number of persons register to speak.” They do not define what constitutes a “large number” of speakers or how restrictive those time limits may get. Three minutes is the maximum amount of time public speakers may be given. 

Food and drinks, including water, are not allowed in the council chamber. That can create a situation in which a person has to leave the council area or City Hall, thereby risking not being there if the meeting resumes while they are gone and their name is called. (While the council often gives a time they aim to be finished with an executive session, it is a purely aspirational estimation and is often off by at least an hour. There is truly no way ever to know when the council will resume a meeting.) 

That in itself poses a problem, as the rules state that any person who registers to speak but fails to appear when called upon is deemed a “no-show,” which bars the person from registering to speak again for 30 days. 

“It’s never a comfortable experience to go address the City Council,” said Javan Gonzalez, a local activist and political organizer. “And so it’s disappointing when residents of Dallas take time off their day and make the effort to go speak and to basically be shot down. Those council members know that most of the people who are signing up are not going to be able to stick around for five or six hours to be heard.” 

Gonzalez had also signed up to speak at the June 10 meeting, and unlike many of the speakers and members of the Council who seem deeply entrenched in their view of what should be done about City Hall, he was undecided. He’d hoped to share his skepticism about both options with the Council and urge the horseshoe to slow down the process of evaluating the building’s options. 

He’d suspected the meeting might become an all-day marathon behind closed doors, so he signed up to speak virtually. He logged on around 9 a.m., expecting the meeting to follow its usual pace. While the Dallas speakers’ rules only guarantee that the first five speakers who are signed up will address the Council, representatives often move to allow all speakers to have their turn.  

That didn’t happen on Wednesday, though. Instead, a handful of speakers — many of whom were former mayors, Council members or state representatives — were squeezed in before the 10 a.m. hour, before the comment period was closed. 

Gonzalez watched the meeting for most of the day, waiting for his moment to address the council. It was hours of royalty-free music playing on loop while the screen promised, “the council will return soon!” (Lie.) 

“I finally gave up around 5 p.m. because I had to make dinner for my family,” he said. “I’ve got things to do. I already devoted eight hours; I couldn’t devote any more.” 

Nine hours into the meeting, Gonzalez got a text from a friend saying his name had been called. He no-showed. 

Terranova, the Harvard-educated architectural expert, described the experience as a “bait and switch” and said she doesn’t know that she’ll ever try to speak to the Council again. She was left confounded by the legal jargon, hours-late start times, and unclear procedures at the meeting. Excuse her for thinking that “we’ll be back in an hour” actually means the council will be back in an hour.

“It just generally felt so chaotic,” said Terranova, who left before witnessing the council return from the special-called meeting’s executive session, only to go straight into the regular meeting’s executive session. The move elicited dismayed laughter from the hungry and dehydrated crowd. “These people are unbelievably flagrant about their corrupt behavior. They’re so unbelievable. … We see it. We see what [they’re] doing. But I don’t think they care about it. I don’t think they care.”

Gonzalez, too, worries that Wednesday’s meeting was an especially “callous” treatment of the public. He was bothered by the decision to limit speakers who’d waited hours to only one minute to talk. 

“The end effect of that is going to be people not feeling engaged by their elected leaders, and they’re not going to show up to do this anymore because they feel like their voice doesn’t matter,” Gonzalez said. “And that’s really sad when it comes to municipal government because that’s the point. Municipal government, it’s the closest to us, and every voice is supposed to matter.”