photo by: YouTube screenshot

Michael Eravi speaks at the Lawrence school board meeting Monday, Feb. 10, 2025, but refuses to stay behind the designated lectern for speakers at left.

For the first time since a pair of public commenters began routinely disrupting government meetings in Lawrence, an official has mentioned the possibility of terminating public comment, at least temporarily.

On Monday night, Lawrence school board president Kelly Jones — after an approximately 30-minute standoff with commenter Michael Eravi, who was refusing to obey board rules — said that the time had come to discuss whether public commenting in its current form had simply become too disruptive.

Nothing in state law requires that governing bodies hear public comment at their meetings, and local entities have grappled for years now with how to run efficient, civil business meetings in the face of routine disruptions and the flouting of decorum rules.

“It is pretty heartbreaking to me to be considering that at this point,” Jones said of the possibility of discontinuing public comment, “but we do not have assistance.”

The lack of assistance she was referring to was the two police officers in the room who effectively let Eravi hold the meeting hostage for nearly half an hour.

“Can we please get assistance?” Jones pleaded more than once, but the officers declined — for which Eravi thanked them when he ultimately did leave.

Eravi’s behavior at the meeting included disobeying board rules, which he dismissed as “bullshit,” by using foul language, calling officials crude names, demanding that they “shut up!” and refusing to either sit down or leave after being warned about his conduct. Eravi also interjected with “points of order,” a parliamentary procedure for board members, not spectators, and he refused to stand at the lectern and speak into a microphone, instead wandering around the meeting room, claiming that a ceiling-mounted screen was too “risky” to stand beneath. At times, as officials spoke, he held his middle finger aloft.

Jones, like most public officials, said she believes that hearing from constituents is a vital part of governance, but the nature of recent commenting has given her and others pause.

One of those others is Shannon Kimball, who has been on the school board for 14 years.

In that time, Kimball said, she has sat through hours and hours of being criticized, often harshly, for this or that decision, which she said she respectfully endures as part of being an elected official, but she told the Journal-World that she has never seen anything like the current atmosphere of public commenting in Lawrence, which she describes as bullying and harassing.

“I believe the purpose of what they are doing is solely to disrupt the meeting and not for any legitimate public discourse,” Kimball said.

As the Journal-World has reported, Eravi and Justin Spiehs, who was muted online Monday after also persisting in violating the board’s rules, frequently show up at city, county, school board and other meetings to ridicule public officials with vulgar language – including in Eravi’s case, use of the N-word and gendered slurs, and in Spiehs’ case insulting remarks about women’s physical appearance.

Both men assert that they have the right to do this under the First Amendment, and between them, they have sued virtually every public official in Douglas County and have been removed from multiple meetings.

Kimball points out, though, as has many a judge, that a government business meeting is not the same setting as a public street corner, and that reasonable rules of decorum can be enforced in “limited public forums” to ensure that the business of the governing body is conducted efficiently.

Spiehs has sought a preliminary injunction prohibiting the city from enforcing its commenting rules until a court decides the merits of one of his federal lawsuits, but Judge Julie Robinson declined to grant a temporary order, saying that Spiehs’ claims were unlikely to succeed on the merits.

Kimball said, “I absolutely believe that the board chair has the authority to enforce the decorum rule during our meeting; to conclude otherwise turns the meeting into a free-for-all, and that is simply not the purpose of the school board meeting,” nor of the state law requiring open meetings, she added.

Kimball also noted that decorum rules are routinely enforced at the Statehouse and in courtrooms, but that “for some reason in this community we seem to have lost the ability to enforce reasonable decorum rules in a public meeting” — a state of affairs that she said required “some deep soul searching.”

Because Jones had no assistance in enforcing the board’s rules, Eravi, taking control of the meeting, told her that her “only option” was to let him speak in any way he wanted, and he ultimately did so, while the police stood by.

Jones, however, announced that she did not have to listen to him.

“I am going to get up and leave, and when you are done I’m going to come back out,” she said.

Eravi then called her departure “a whiny bitch move,” prompting Kimball to also leave the room. The other board members, though, sat tight as Eravi instructed them to “shut your [expletive] mouths!”

photo by: YouTube screenshot

Lawrence school board member Shannon Kimball briefly leaves the meeting Monday, Feb. 10, 2025, after Eravi used vulgar language to describe board president Kelly Jones.

City Commissioner Amber Sellers has also taken the stand that being an elected official involves hearing criticism — and lots of it —  but does not require her to face abusive name-calling and degrading personal attacks in a public setting. She has opted during numerous meetings to listen to public comment outside of the meeting room, citing, while not naming names, “intimidation tactics, including threats and bullying, that seek to create an atmosphere of fear and hostility.”

Aside from decorum breaches, public officials and others have said that the disruptions, sometimes accompanied by people being hectored, filmed and followed to their cars, have a chilling effect on civic engagement. In summer 2023, City Manager Craig Owens notified Eravi that he was banned for 60 days from attending City Commission meetings in person after exhibiting “threatening and harassing behavior,” including telling two commissioners that he knew where they lived. Owens said in the letter that the ban came after Eravi had been asked to leave or was removed from meetings “no less than five times.”

Kimball thinks that people, whether members of the public or those seeking public office, are less likely to “put themselves in spaces” where such behavior is allowed — a sentiment echoed by Bonnie Lowe, the president and CEO of The Chamber and a former Lawrence mayor, in a recent letter to the editor condemning “hurtful, cruel, and vulgar comments.”

“While the overwhelming number of participants in public meetings voice opinions in a tone of mutual respect, the hostile and demeaning behavior of a few may chill the constructive dialogue needed to move the important work of our community forward,” Lowe wrote.

Lowe cited a 2023 survey from the Brennan Center for Justice, which found that more than 40% of local officials said they were less willing to run for reelection or higher office because of abuse.

The City Commission has moved its general public comment period to the end of its meetings, at which point most city staff members leave the room, and that portion of the meeting is no longer part of the live stream.

How the school board will address the issue is still in the works. Jones said Monday that there was some confusion as to who had the authority to ask that Eravi be removed from the meeting, and the Lawrence Police Department told the Journal-World Monday that the chief of police was going to meet with Jones and Jeanice Swift, the district’s interim superintendent, to discuss what happened and what needs to happen going forward. Whether that meeting had happened by Thursday was unclear.

Jones, though, told the Journal-World on Tuesday that “for my part, I will next time know what the limitations are,” and that she would like to create an environment in which the school board retains public commenting.

“Particularly right now, we have a couple of really significant things happening in the district and are going to need the public’s input and people are going to need access to us,” Jones said. “I’d like to create a public comment space in which their viewpoint and everyone’s viewpoints can be heard.”

She added that the next step for the school board is to look at a variety of factors such as where public comment will be included in the evening’s agenda and to overall just “create some more guardrails” for these kinds of disruptions.

“I’m going to work with Dr. Swift and my board colleagues to determine what’s the best option for us in our next meeting,” Jones said. “I want to hear a viewpoint. I want to hear what people have to say, so the goal is to find a way to support people in accessing the board without eliminating public comment altogether.”

Meanwhile, the YouTube recording of Monday’s school board comes with a warning: “This video may be inappropriate for some users.” And as Eravi told the board members who stayed in the room, he plans to keep doing what he’s been doing.

“As a result of the way this meeting’s gone,” he said, “I’ll be back again in a couple weeks.”

— Reporter Josie Heimsoth contributed to this story.