Guest columnist Josh Silver: Common sense ideas for civil, efficient city meetings

If you follow Northampton city politics, you know that hostility and acrimony dominate marathon-length City Council and School Committee meetings. This is a big reason that many of our elected officials have recently announced they will not seek reelection this year — and there are very few candidates raising their hands to run for these important positions.

Supercharged by toxic social media posts, ugly personal attacks have become more common than fact-based, collaborative debate in Northampton. It eerily mirrors our broken national discourse, and it must change. Recently, I’ve asked friends and acquaintances to run for local office. The overwhelming response: “Why would I sign up for endless, acrimonious meetings that are routinely commandeered by a handful of toxic, filibustering mudslingers?” The answer is clear: let’s rewrite the rules that determine how City Council and committees are facilitated and conducted. Here’s a relatively simple proposal for how we can fix the problem, and make Northampton a place where exceptional people want to run for local office.

First, we need to simply enforce a few existing rules and laws that apply to city meetings, but are routinely ignored in Northampton: Members may only speak to items on the agenda as required by Massachusetts Open Meeting Law. Topics not on the agenda should not be discussed. Members may not engage in ad hominem exchanges. Put another way: you can debate the issues, but you cannot use meeting time to attack other people. If/when that happens, the presiding member must firmly move on to the next speaker or agenda item. Time limits for speaking should be firmly enforced at all times, and all members shall have an opportunity to speak before a councilor or School Committee member is granted an opportunity to speak a second time.

Those are the common sense, existing rules that need to be firmly enforced. On top of that, we should also change three rules: First, City Council and School Committee agendas should last no more than 2.5 hours. If the budget is on the agenda, agendas can go up to 3.5 hours, with a hard stop at 4 hours. Second, council and committee member “announcements” should be limited to one minute. Longer announcements are routinely exploited to raise issues not on the agenda and derail meetings. Finally, total public comment time should be reduced from 90 to 60 minutes, and time limits for speakers at School Committee should be set at 2 minutes. (same as current City Council time limit).

Changing these rules isn’t sexy, but it’s essential. Similar ones have been embraced and successfully implemented in many other cities across the nation. We the people of Northampton need to demand them so that Northampton public office can be effective, efficient, respectful and kind again.

Josh Silver lives in Northampton.