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The Sanjiv Handa Rule, needed because two people rambling at public comments does not equal open government

After years of trying multiple means of controlling the time Sanjiv Handa wastes takes up at City Council meetings, on Tuesday night the City Council passed rule changes that might finally accomplish that goal.

I’ll get to that part in a minute, but first, I’ll cover the rule changes that even Sanjiv supported. The Council is finally admitting that their meetings are absurdly long so they should start them earlier and acknowledge that they end later. From the staff report, here’s a breakdown of the current and now amended meeting times:

	Current	New
Commencement	6pm	5:30pm
Non-consent	7pm	6:30pm
Adjournment	10:30pm	12:00am

This is great news. The Council will start its ceremonial items at 5:30pm and hopefully end those and the consent calendar by 6:30pm. Even when they’re running late with long ceremonial items, they should at least start by 7pm. This will be a welcome change, since in the past, when ceremonial items dragged on, the Council sometimes didn’t get started until 7:30 or 8pm. The adjournment time change is really no change at all, just an acknowledgment that the Council almost never ends by 10:30pm (maybe once or twice a year they do). It’s pretty silly that at basically every meeting a motion has to be made to extend the meeting, so that will now be done away with.

But with the new rules on speaker limits, Council meetings could potentially end before midnight! If you’ve ever seen a Council or committee meeting, you know that Sanjiv Handa takes up a LOT of time at these meetings. He signs up for every single item and gets to speak for two minutes on each item. Sometimes the meeting chair negotiates with him and gets him to take all of his time at once and speak for a slightly shorter amount of time total. No matter what the chair does though, Sanjiv regularly takes up 45+ minutes of Council meetings and 20-30 minutes of committee meetings. It’s maddening.

And lately, David Mix has been joining him at every Council meeting so that together they end up taking up an hour and a half of each meeting! It might make them feel like they’re sticking it to the Council and standing up for Oaklanders, but their main effect is to turn people off by making the Council meetings run on and on until everyone who’s not paid to be there goes to sleep.

The new speaker limit rules seem to solve this problem. From the staff report, here’s the breakdown of the new speaker limits:

Meeting	Speaker Limit
Standing Committees (including Rules)	Speakers who submit more than 4 speaker cards (excluding open forum) will be given 2 minutes per card up to a maximum of 10 minutes. If all speakers are given 1 minute, speakers with 4 or more cards will be given a maximum of 5 minutes.
Rules Committee Meetings (Scheduling Item)	Speakers will have one minute per scheduling request up to a maximum of 5 minutes, provided that total time on all items on the Rules agenda (excluding open forum) for each speaker shall not exceed 10 minutes.
City Council Meetings – Open Forum	Speakers are allotted a minimum of 1 minute and a maximum of 3 minutes (no change).
City Council Meetings – Items before Non-Consent	Speakers with multiple cards will be given 2 minutes per item up to a maximum of 6 minutes (excluding open forum).
City Council Meetings -Non-Consent Items	If 20 or total cards have been submitted, speakers who submit 4 or more cards will be given 2 minutes per item up to a maximum of 10 minutes.

What does this mean? Let’s take Tuesday’s Council meeting for example. Under these rules, Sanjiv Handa and David Mix would have each been able to speak for 1 minute during Open Forum, 6 minutes during consent, and 10 minutes during non-consent. They would have each received a total of 17 minutes, or 34 minutes combined. This would have made Tuesday’s Council meeting an hour shorter!

Handa and Mix argued that limiting speaker time closes access to the government, and Councilmember Desley Brooks agreed. But this argument is based on the assumption that two people rambling for an hour and a half (longer than most of the elected councilmembers speak at a meeting!) equals open government. Sure, it opens the government up to two people, but it closes it off to everyone else.

The Council and their staff get paid to sit through those ramblings, but the rest of us don’t. So when we get tired, hungry, or just can’t take it in anymore, we leave City Hall or turn off our computers and TVs. If you follow Council meetings on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that between 7pm-9pm, there are several people tweeting the meeting. At 9:30 or 10pm, one or two drop off. By the time 11pm rolls around, it’s rare that even one person is left tweeting. Why? Well, for me, I have a job to get to in the morning and unless there’s something really exciting on the agenda, I can’t justify staying up so late.

With the new rules, I’ll make it through most meetings, and I bet others will too. As Brooks noted, it’s unlikely that many more people will speak at meetings, but that’s not the only important part about open government. More importantly, people will be able to sit through the whole meeting (or come close to it). More of us will know what happened at the Council, either by watching or by following on Twitter.

Thanks to Councilmembers Brunner, De La Fuente, Kaplan, and Kernighan for introducing these changes. I look forward to watching entire Council meetings and to having to use my mute button a lot less frequently.

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