Friday Jan 9th, 2015 8:56 AM
City Council (through Mayor Don Lane) and the City Administration behind it (i.e. the Martin Bernal, the City Manager, and his staff) will be voting on more repressive decorum rules as the first order of business in the afternoon session of the January 13th City Council meeting this Tuesday. This is apparently their response to the public outrage at the December 9th meeting over the SCPD’s sneak rush of the quarter-of-a-million-buck BEARCAT armored personnel “rescue’ vehicle. Lane has also placed the wildly-unconstitutional and explosive Stay-Away law to the end of the evening agenda.
I suspect the decorum change and Stay-Away order scheduling at the end of the meeting are specifically designed to shrink, cool, and discourage protest.
Scheduled protests:
Stop the Bearcat at 2 PM http://www.indybay.org/
Protest New Anti-Homeless Law and Urban Assault Vehicle at http://www.indybay.org/
A HUFF (Homeless United for Friendship & Freedom) protest at times to be announced.
The City has also adopted a new, less publicly accessible means, of responding to Public Records Act requests. The SCPD no longer takes such requests directly, but routes them through Nydia Patino at City Hall. More importantly, the requests are being responded to in hard copy letters (usually rejection or restriction) from the City Attorney’s answer.
It has still not responded to my request of weeks ago to see documentation that confirms the exact date and the real deadline for accepting the BEARCAT vehicle.
His new definition of “disruption” is “whenever a rule is broken and a Mayor is ‘forced’ to stop the meeting”. So whenever a Mayor disrupts his own meeting, this becomes the fault of the public. So, if you turn your back on the Council while speaking and there’s a rule against doing so (which there arguably now is–that’s an additional change), you are “disrupting” the meeting. This flies in the face of the 9th Circuit Court ruling that states a “disruption” can only be an actual disruption not a potential one or one created by the Council’s have a “hissy fit”.