The Denver City Council voted to change the sign-up for its weekly public comment session Monday, opting to prioritize people who haven’t spoken at previous meetings.

From now on, people who haven’t spoken at a public comment session in the last 90 days will be sent to the top of the speaker list, followed by people who haven’t spoken in the last week. Those who spoke in the last week will be pushed to the bottom of the list.

“The reason for this change is just to give people an opportunity to speak who we haven’t heard from recently,” said Councilwoman Kendra Black, who sponsored the proposal. “We’ve had a number of people reach out to us saying they signed up for multiple weeks and didn’t get to speak.”

The City Council holds public comment sessions every Monday before the regular council meeting. The sessions are 30 minutes long, allowing speakers up to three minutes to talk about any city issue they want. The sign-up for the session was previously first-come, first-served, except for people who spoke in the previous session.

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The council passed the change in a 12 to 1 vote following opposition from some community members during Monday’s public comment session.

“They do not want us to speak,” Denver resident Dave Hagan said. “They’re voting on changing public comments. Why? Why are we not extending it? There’s no initiative to hear the people that they serve.”

Other speakers during the public comment session alleged that the council was “silencing” the community with the rule change, calling it an example of “fascism.”

Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca also opposed to the change, voting against it after saying the council did not adequately consider other options to solve the issue of some community members not being able to participate.

“It didn’t explore other options to expand access to public comment,” CdeBaca said. “It didn’t thoroughly engage the public in defining the problem or potential solutions. And it potentially punishes people for participating regularly.”

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Councilman Paul Kashmann, who sponsored the original legislation that established public comment sessions in 2016, defended the change. Kashmann said the council has repeatedly expanded public comment, pointing out that public comment sessions began as only being held once a month and were not televised.

The current City Council opted to make public comment sessions weekly and televised a few years later.

“My support of this is to try to broaden the ideas brought before this body,” Kashmann said. “(The public comment session) was never intended for everybody to get to speak every week. I think it’s evident that this council’s behavior has been to expand the reach of public comment.”

Kashmann said if the change ends up resulting in negative consequences – like community members being regularly prevented from speaking – they will reevaluate the policy.

The new system will rely on the honor system, asking speakers to indicate on the sign-up sheet whether they have spoken at a recent comment session.

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