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Hours into the public comment session at Tuesday’s City Council meeting, it finally was Karen Williams-Caldwell’s chance to speak about a business she saw as a nuisance to her corner of northeast Houston.
Williams-Caldwell, who had her moment at the podium after a parade of speakers addressing a controversial roadway project in Montrose, was told that she would be limited to one minute.
She was distressed.
“Montrose got to be able to speak as long as they wanted to speak,” Williams-Caldwell said. “I am a person just like you, and I want to be heard. I didn’t know how this works.”
In the end, council members gave Williams-Caldwell more time to complain about a business she said pumps loud music and the smell of drugs into the residential neighborhood.
Speaking out at public meetings is a treasured civic right in the United States, where residents opine on everything from marital to international relations in front of bored, bemused or intrigued officials.
Mayor John Whitmire says experiences like Williams-Caldwell’s are too common in Houston. At many council meetings, residents complain about hours-long waits for minute-long speeches. Whitmire has promised a revamp of council rules for public comment to make it easier to speak at the last minute or even after workday hours.
It is not the only council shake-up Whitmire is pursuing.
Four months after Houstonians voted to allow City Council members to place items on the agenda, Whitmire’s administration is moving to implement that charter change, appointing District G Councilmember Mary Nan Huffman to oversee a new committee to vet council ordinances.
More broadly, Whitmire claims he is making a stylistic break with former Mayor Sylvester Turner by giving council members more leeway to debate important issues. He says he wants City Council to have more of the deliberations common at the Texas Capitol, where he served as a legislator for a half century until his December election.
“Whitmire has taken a more balanced approach early on,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “The caveat, I will note, is that it is early, so we haven’t seen a lot of the fights that are going to define his mayoral term yet.”
New rules
Tuesday’s public comment sessions are a time-honored tradition at Houston City Council, but the requirements for speaking often have tripped up residents.
Under city ordinance, speakers are required to sign up ahead of the meeting at the city secretary’s office, which enforces a rule requiring residents to sign up 23 hours before the typical Tuesday starting time.
Speakers who have not commented at any of the prior four meetings are allowed to have their choice of talking for one, two or three minutes – but only if the total time of all public comment does not exceed 150 minutes. In that case, all are limited to one minute.
In practice, the mayor and council members sometimes grant members of the public more time to discuss issues they are passionate about.
The one-minute limit was in effect for all speakers on Tuesday, when Williams-Caldwell addressed council, according to Troy Lemon, an employee of the City Secretary’s Office.
The time limit – and the need to sign up the day before – have frustrated some of the dozens of residents who have come to Council to speak up in favor of a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, according to William White, director of the Houston office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“A lot of times, I have seen people want to go and speak, regular, working folks, not being on the agenda and not realizing they had to sign up the day before,” he said.
Since taking office, Whitmire repeatedly has said he wants to change city rules so speakers can sign up the day of the public comment session.
“I just can’t believe the way we all talk about involvement, inclusion, and you can’t get up and read something in the paper … you can’t come down and testify because you didn’t sign up the day before. So, that’s the direction we’re going in terms of the rules,” he said at a Feb. 21 council meeting.
Whitmire also has spoken about the possibility of allowing public comments at night, after normal working hours, and holding meetings in different neighborhoods.
The new mayor, who also has been juggling delicate negotiations with the Houston firefighters’ union and a scandal at the Houston Police Department, has not laid out a timeline for tweaking public participation rules.
Whether changes to public comment will result in any shifts at the policy level is another matter. White said ceasefire supporters often face council members who refuse to engage. Still, he believes the public comments have “absolutely” increased the number of council members backing a ceasefire, which by his count is up to five. Whitmire has not joined the call.
A new kind of agenda
Last Friday, Whitmire made his first public step toward implementing Proposition A, the voter-approved charter change that allows any three council members to place an item on the agenda for consideration.
Whitmire appointed Huffman, one of only three council members to attempt using her new power thus far, to lead a dedicated “Prop A” committee.
Although it is typical for council members in some cities to be able to set their own agenda, in Houston it marks a break from the city’s “strong mayor” system that long has concentrated power in the mayor’s office.
Huffman said her appointment as committee chair came as a surprise but welcome opportunity. She envisions the committee as a workshop for council members in the early stages of crafting an ordinance.
That vision is shared by the mayor’s office, according to Deputy Chief of Staff Steven David. He said the administration plans to ask members of the Proposition A committee to draft rules outlining the process for council-proposed ordinances. Those specifics were not spelled out in the charter amendment.
“We wanted to create a path that lets them have a more robust discussion about the policy itself,” David said. “It allows the departments to attend and talk about it in an open discussion, in an open forum, of what the policy impact of this ordinance could be.”
The charter amendment still allows any three council members to skip that step if their ordinance passes legal review. The legal review requirement has delayed for now the sole attempt by council members this term to put an item on the agenda, a measure designed to change the process for requesting speed cushions from the Department of Public Works.
Huffman was involved in the only other attempt to put an item on the agenda last year, when she joined with Councilmembers Amy Peck and Carolyn Evans-Shabazz to propose a water bill relief ordinance.
The proposal essentially was co-opted by Turner, who incorporated it into a bigger water bill package. Huffman said she expects the council to ramp up use of its new power in the future.
“People were kind of letting (Whitmire) settle in before we started putting things on the agenda,” she said. “Mayor Whitmire has been great to work with so far.”
Lasting change?
Whitmire has taken pains to assert that he is taking a more collaborative approach to his relationship with the council than his predecessor.
After a lengthy discussion about the pros and cons of the city’s “civility” ordinance on Feb. 21, Whitmire said he was proud that he and council members aired their thoughts in public. He also took a swipe at a rule that requires council members to vote to continue debating agenda items past noon.
“I think we need to review, in my judgment, how we run the council meetings,” he said. “You’ve got to actually change the rules to work past 12 o’clock. I don’t know where that came from. A long time ago, probably.”
Whitmire’s stylistic shift has been apparent to Nancy Sims, a University of Houston political analyst.
“Whitmire really seems to listen. Now, I have seen him be pretty assertive about things he cares strongly about, but he lets everybody have their say,” she said.
At the same time, Sims said, Whitmire was slow in naming committee chairs, who were formally announced last week. Previous administrations, to varying degrees, used the council committee system to vet and build support for proposed ordinances.
Whitmire also said recently that he has yet to meet with all of the council members in one-on-one settings, which Sims found surprising.
Part of the shift in tone at council meetings may be due to the new powers represented by the Proposition A committee, according to Rottinghaus, the political science professor.
“Council members have got more power to initiate agenda items than they have before. So, that means that he has to be slightly more diplomatic than Mayor Turner, just to be able to keep control of the agenda flow,” he said.
He said the real test of mayor-council relationship will come when council members have to approve a budget by July 1 in an environment of expiring federal pandemic relief funds and a huge financial settlement for Houston firefighters. That could leave little money left over for council priorities.
“We’ll see some serious budget fights in the near future, and those are going to be where we really see how effective he is, and how his style interacts with the need to be effective in council,” Rottinghaus said.
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