photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Members of the public line up to share public comment during the Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023 Lawrence City Commission meeting.

When Lawrence gets a new city manager, it could also get a new look for its City Commission meetings – one with public comments near the beginning instead of at the end.

At Tuesday’s City Commission meeting, Mayor Brad Finkeldei said he was interested in changing the order of the meeting agendas to move certain items to earlier in the evening. He said that might include the city manager’s comments and the commission’s miscellaneous discussion, and also mentioned “bringing public comment back to the first part of the meeting.”

Currently, general public comment is the very last thing on the City Commission’s meeting agenda, sometimes happening well after 10 p.m. It’s also not part of the city’s Zoom livestream. But before the commission made those changes in mid-2024, general public comment was one of the first things on the agenda.

Finkeldei said Tuesday that he’d like to discuss with city staff how differently structured meetings might look, and he said ideally these changes would coincide with the hiring of the new city manager, which is expected within the next couple of months.

“I would be interested,” Commissioner Kristine Polian said. “Most definitely.”

The possibility of changing the meeting order came up while Finkeldei was discussing a “civility pledge” that the National League of Cities is asking its members to implement. He said the league was “trying to increase civility and fight violence that’s occurring against elected officials and within communities.”

Shortly before the public comment period was moved to the end in 2024, some incivility did show up at a City Commission meeting. In April 2024, a meeting was derailed after multiple public commenters on Zoom engaged in racist and antisemitic hate speech, using the N-word, displaying a flaming swastika and calling another commenter a “f-cking c-nt.”

Even after the changes were made, obscene comments and hate speech still occurred at meetings throughout 2024. One public commenter signed up on Zoom using a pornographic fake name and spoke graphically about fellatio, female genitalia and ejaculation, and another commenter berated then-Mayor Bart Littlejohn, who is Black, using the N-word.

Local governments are not legally required to permit general public comment at their business meetings and can set their own rules regarding matters such as time limits and when the commenting can occur. Another governing body that has experienced obscene and disruptive comments at its meetings, the Lawrence school board, no longer has a general public comment period at all.