Going forward, the public forum procedure at Naperville City Council meetings will be handled a little differently to ensure city business is heard in a timely manner.
Tuesday night, the council voted 7-2 to split public forum so that the first 30 minutes of speakers are heard at the start of a meeting and anyone else signed up to address the council will speak towards the end, right before new business is discussed.
The change does not limit the public’s ability to address the council or affect those who sign up to speak on a specific agenda item, council members clarified Tuesday. It just tweaks procedure so that agenda matters are not put off to late night hours by long public forum sessions at the beginning of meetings.
The ordinance amendment also is not restrictive. The council will have the flexibility to, by a majority vote, allow more people to speak beyond the 30-minute mark when they deem appropriate. For instance, if the initial public forum has gone on for a half hour but there’s just one more speaker remaining, the council could allow that speaker to go ahead rather than pushing their three minutes of remarks to the end of the meeting.
The impetus for altering the public forum goes back to a meeting in June at which Mayor Scott Wehrli suggested city staff investigate potential changes to council processes to “make sure we’re doing our best to provide that transparency (and) improve council meeting efficiency,” he said at the time.
Wehrli said that in 2023, staff took a look at the city’s boards and commissions to ensure they were functioning efficiently. He advised that “now that we’ve got boards and commissions checked off the list,” it was time to bring the same critical eye to council procedures. Staff was directed to return with a report at a later date.
At the council’s Aug. 20 meeting, staff presented options for improving meeting efficiency after reviewing the agenda processes of 18 municipalities in DuPage County.
Previously, Naperville municipal code allowed public comments to be made at the beginning of meetings with no time limit. There was a degree of flexibility with that, and the council had the authority to divide the list of speakers between the front and back end of meetings as they saw fit depending on how many were signed up to speak. But it was a discretionary, meeting-by-meeting decision.
Staff suggested the council could limit the initial public forum to 60 minutes or all speakers could be moved the end of the meeting. The council ultimately settled on a 30-minute limit at the meeting’s start and for those not heard to speak later; staff was directed to come back with an ordinance that codified that arrangement.
Council members Allison Longenbaugh and Nate Wilson voted against the amendment Tuesday. Longenbaugh said she did not have a “fundamental problem” with the change, but thought the proposed change “overcomplicates things.”
“What I think this ordinance does is it kind of eliminates some of the fluidity that we have with the way it is now,” she said.
Other members were supportive of having a more defined public forum policy so petitioners and speakers know what to expect when they attend a meeting.
“It’s probably the right thing to do to have some policy in place so that we’re not arbitrarily making a discretionary decision at a meeting and we can fall back and not appear as though we’re playing favoritism,” Councilman Josh McBroom said.
“We have a lot of agenda items throughout these city council meetings,” Wehrli added, “where petitioners have been waiting weeks, months, if not years to get on our agenda and have their city business heard … (by a) city council that’s going to be well-rested and awake to hear everything they have to say and vote on their topic with their discretion.”
