Salem's Mayor gets irked at my No 3rd Bridge sign

"Teacher, um, no, I mean MAYOR, don't kick me out of the City Council meeting! It was my pal who put me up to it, REALLY!"

I felt like saying this when Mayor Anna Peterson interrupted a staff presentation at tonight's Salem City Council work session on the Salem River Crossing, a.k.a. the Billion Dollar Third Bridge Boondoggle. Check out this one-minute video.

 

But Peterson was so irked at me peacefully holding the sign that Jim Scheppke had given me, I decided to non-meekly put the sign in my lap rather than incur the Wrath of Anna and risk being thrown out of a meeting that I wanted to see.

In another post I'll write about the substance of what went on in the work session. Basically, the notion of an unneeded, unwanted, and unpaid-for Third Bridge came in for some entirely appropriate tough questioning from Councilor Tom Andersen, and the responses he got were decidedly unconvincing. 

Anyway, regarding my being chewed-out by Teacher Mayor Peterson, the episode made me feel delightfully young again. It reminded me so much of my high school days. 

Innocent well-behaved me walks into the City Council chambers, carrying a backpack with my notebook and pens, all ready to attentively sit in my seat and take notes on the Third Bridge work session.

Then my bad-boy friend Jim Scheppke, a leader of the No 3rd Bridge campaign, comes up to me. 

"Hey, Brian, why don't you take this sign and sit right behind the podium where staff will make their presentation. Hold the sign so it will show up on the CCTV camera."

Seemed like a reasonable request. Hey, I had to sit somewhere. Why not in the empty chair behind the podium? It wasn't like Jim was daring me to lick a frozen metal pole with my tongue, was it? 

Well, maybe.

In retrospect maybe I should have given more thought to the question, If holding the No 3rd Bridge sign while sitting in that seat was such a good idea, why wasn't Jim doing this himself?

The answer became apparent a few minutes into the staff person's presentation, as the video above shows.

I just looked through the Salem City Council rules. The "Decorum" section says nothing about audience members not being allowed to hold signs. In fact, "sign" isn't even mentioned in the rules. 

And here's what can cause a person to be thrown out of a City Council meeting.

Any person who disrupts a Council meeting making personal, impertinent, slanderous or unauthorized remarks or who becomes boisterous while addressing the Council or attending a Council meeting shall first be warned by the Presiding Officer that they are "out of order", and that further disruption shall be cause to remove the person from the meeting.

Mayor Peterson seems to believe that peacefully holding a sign while sitting quietly in a chair is acting "boisterous." It sure doesn't appear like she had the authority to throw me out if I hadn't put the No 3rd Bridge sign in my lap.

Maybe next time I'll be more assertive about my free speech rights. This is typical of the Mayor and her current right-wing City Council majority. Citizen involvement is viewed by them as an irritant, not an integral aspect of democracy.

Me at home with my sign, looking as "boisterous" as I did at the City Council meeting 

Comments

[Jim Scheppke]

Sorry Brian. For the meeting next Monday I will make signs that say "I HAVE A 1ST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO HOLD THIS SIGN" and I will join you in holding one. Deal?

[JT]

that zebra print shirt is a distraction to many animal activists. I am not one of them but just saying.

[Brian Hines]

Jim, deal. So long as we hold the signs after we testify. I don't want to be thrown out before I get a chance to talk for three minutes about how stupid an idea the unneeded billion dollar bridge is.

[Mary Ann Baclawski]

Umm, you sound as if you didn't know exactly what would happen if you held up that sign. We had signs several years ago at the council meeting discussing the different bridge alternatives. Jim helped distribute them. The mayor's reaction was exactly the same. We need t-shirts with lots of women wearing them. I'd love to see the mayor order the women to take off their shirts. 😄

[Brian Hines]

You're right, Mary Ann, I didn't know.

Jim Scheppke sweet-talked me so skillfully into doing the Hold-the-Sign-to-your-Chest deed, I never thought that this (supposedly) isn't allowed at City Council meetings. As noted in this post, I see no evidence that the Council has banned signs. I think the Mayor just considers them "boisterous" and "disruptive."

Plus, I wasn't holding the sign up. It was sitting over my plain gray t-shirt almost exactly where an image would be. So now I'm excited about going to the next Council meeting on this subject and sitting in the same exact chair while wearing a bright red No 3rd Bridge t-shirt.

[Alex]

Why not just print it on a t-shirt and wear it to the next meeting?

[Alex Kohan]

Yep signs are definitely not against the rules of decorum for the city council. I might be wrong but I don't think Mayor Peterson has any authority to try and ban people from holding the signs. She seems to think that she is a dictator who can assert any tyrannical rule that she wants.

I like the suggestion for next time of having t-shirts with the logo on them. Or big foam fingers with the No 3rd bridge logo on them.

[Linnie rich]

What a. One sided bitch she is. So fricken unfair. She needs to get the hell out of there