A Dallas City Council rule limiting residents to speaking to the council once every 30 days has surfaced.
According to the city’s speaker registration guidelines, requirements, and rules, no person may register to speak during an open microphone period more than once within 30 days.
“Except for speaking during public hearing items, individuals who have addressed the city council in any of the Open Microphone categories are required to wait 30 days to address the city council again on any issue on the agenda or during the Open Microphone categories,” reads the guidelines.
The guidelines were revised in October 2019.
The rule resurfaced after the nonprofit organization Keep Dallas Safe posted a video to X of council members ignoring a resident, writing, “Dallas City Council imposes an arbitrary rule where you can only speak once every 30 days. Better hope they choose to pay attention to you when you speak!”
Nonprofit organization Dallas HERO, which has had other run-ins with the city council, told Texas Scorecard that the council is “arrogant and unprepared.”
“Dallas Hero reached out and attempted to engage with the City Council with very little success. The majority of [the] city council completely ignored our organization, our 170,000 petitions, our requests for meetings, and yet several of them falsely stated on the record that we had not engaged with them, and therefore, they were against the petitions. What I witnessed was a very arrogant and unprepared city council,” said Dallas HERO’s Executive Director Pete Marocco.
Marocco says he has been denied the opportunity to speak because of the rule.
“I am disappointed that I was denied speaking because I had spoken in the last 30 days. Particularly when the city is not properly noticing its actions and putting items on agendas last minute, stifling free open speech is a problem,” he said. “Also, when the city council will allow speakers is highly unpredictable, meaning a person has to commit a whole day not knowing when they might be able to speak. Could be 9 a.m. or after 6 p.m.”
“The city council’s efforts to silence Dallas citizens is unacceptable, and as the Supreme Court of Texas found, it was also unlawful. Ironically, despite that, our 170,000 signatures for better security and accountability far surpassed the 20,000 signature requirement, and the city council groaned against citizen petitions that we—the citizens—should leave governing to them, in the same breath the city council put forward a proposition to lower the requirement to 5,000 signatures to get on the ballot. The city council’s hypocrisy is baffling and points to the dangerous ground they are laying for their next term–no doubt filled with radical steps,” he added.
The Dallas City Council has also come under fire for three members proposing city charter amendments that would have undermined citizen-led reforms brought forth by Dallas HERO.
Dallas HERO then filed three lawsuits—one at the federal level and two with the Texas Supreme Court and the Texas Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas—saying that the three members’ amendments violated a Dallas resident’s civil rights, the Texas Constitution’s one-subject rule, and a good faith agreement between the city and Dallas HERO.
Since then, the Texas Supreme Court sided with Dallas HERO, ruling that the city must remove the three proposed charter amendments from the November ballot.
Marocco says that “Dallas voters need to think very, very carefully about all 18 propositions” on the November ballot.
“Much of the language the city council used is misleading and does not reveal key features of measures. If you love Dallas, want better government accountability, and you support your police, vote yes, FOR Propositions S, T & U—the last three propositions.”
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