The Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly has more control over what topics can be discussed during public presentations. That’s after members voted last week to give the assembly president the power to limit the subject of those presentations to things that fall under the borough’s authority.
The assembly unanimously approved the ordinance – the first introduced this year. Ryan Tunseth is one of the ordinance sponsors and the current assembly president. He says it was inspired, in part, by his own experience grappling with which presentations to allow or not allow.
“It just says that any member of the public may request to make a formal presentation, and that it's at the concurrence and discretion of the assembly president to schedule that,” he said. “And so when I read that, I didn't feel like it really provided a lot of guidance as to maybe what sort of things might not be appropriate. And I think those things can sometimes be controversial.”
Over the last year, the assembly has had formal presentations from members of the public on everything from legislative updates, to investigative grand juries, to school district reports to homeless outreach events.
Assembly member Michael Hicks supported the change, and agrees that the 10-minute presentations aren’t always relevant to the group’s responsibilities.
“The public time here can be used as a bully pit, you know, just to address things that are not pertinent to the assembly,” he said.
The agenda item tweaked by the ordinance isn’t the only opportunity for public comment during assembly meetings. Even with the changes, people still have three minutes to talk about non-agenda items at the beginning of the meeting, three minutes to talk about anything at the end of the meeting and three minutes to testify about specific items up for a public hearing.
As originally proposed, the ordinance included a list of permissible presentation topics. But that list was later removed, in favor of a more general rule limiting topics to borough services.
Multiple assembly members said the ordinance should not be construed as discouraging members of the public from bringing topics to their attention. Here’s Dale Eicher, who represents Sterling and Funny River.
“We don't restrict the public from bringing things you know to our attention,” he said. “I think it's important that the public feels and knows that they can, you know, access us at any time.”
The changes are effective immediately.
