"we can limit them to one area" --Joe Pritchard

On the front page of the paper VDT today County Manager Joe Pritchard proposes further restrictions on citizens in public County Commission meetings:

"We cannot stop anybody from taking video of a session; but we can limit them to one area; it's distracting to us and to citizens to have somebody running around the session trying to get different angles," said Joe Pritchard, county manager.

The only person I've seen running around the session trying to get different angles is Paige Dukes, County Clerk. Will she now be prohibited from coming out from behind the bar to take pictures of awards and such?

Why they can't stop anybody from taking video, according to Georgia law, O.C.G.A. § 50-14-1-c.:

"Visual, sound, and visual and sound recording during open meetings shall be permitted."

Some courts do put some restrictions on visual recordings, such as prohibiting pictures of jurors. But the Lowndes County Commission is not a court. It is the only elected body for the entire county, and thus the only public forum at which citizens can peacefully assemble to petition their local government for redress of county-wide grievances.

Does the Commission really want to put more restrictions on citizens in its meetings, even though a constitutional scholar is questioning the constitutionality of the rules they recently passed? Rules which limit the number of speakers in Citizens Wishing to be Heard to 10 and

say the Commission can declare subjects closed, among other questionable restrictions? Rules that are already under legal review by the NAACP?

In the same article:

"Our citizen complaints are insignificant compared to what they were ten to 12 years ago, but we need to continue to fine-tune the process," said Paige Dukes, Lowndes County Information officer.

If citizen complaints are insignificant, it sounds to me like the Commission is trying to solve a non-problem, and thereby creating a new problem.

Further:

Safety concerns about the citizens-to-be-heard section of commission meetings was also discussed.

Remember this invention of new restrictions on citizens happened just after Chairman Paulk turned a simple event invitation into an interrogation, alleging he'd received a threatening letter. The actual letter contains nothing more threatening than the phrase "a wakeup call". I've been attending Commission meetings for years, and the only safety problem I've ever seen was when the Chairman made what many observers interpreted as a veiled threat to arrest the inviter. Given what I've heard about local jail conditions, that would be a safety concern for the citizen.

Now that the county government has dug itself into a PR hole, maybe they should stop digging!

A much simpler solution would be to have the county itself video its own meetings and make them available on the web, as I recommended to them on 25 January 2011:

Regular meeting of the Lowndes County Commission, 25 Jan 2011
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange. Many city and county governments find video recording beneficial to the local government, among other reasons to "protect the city [or county] from litigation and open up government to more residents."

If the Lowndes County Commission instead keeps adding restrictions to what citizens can do in their meetings, people may start to wonder what the Commission is hiding and why they are afraid of the citizens.

-jsq