WE’D REALLY LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU (But if you would just shut up …)

Published in the February 8, 2025 edition.

Mammoth Lakes Town Council held a session where the public could express their opinions on town amenities at Council’s first meeting of the year. But at its most recent meeting on Wednesday, the Council came to a consensus that individual public comment time should be capped at three minutes instead of the current allotted five minutes. 

Mayor Chris Bubser brought the issue of shortening the time forward as a “best practice.” During the aforementioned request for public comment, Bubser had used her mayoral powers to shorten the allotted time to three minutes day-of. The public comment period lasted approximately 30 minutes within the six-hour meeting. 

Other public comment sessions have run long as well; for instance, the comment period lasted nearly an hour in the wake of the euthanization of Victor the bear, and a public hearing on an appeal of a proposed cell tower on Old Mammoth exceeded three hours. In the Victor the bear session, there was no three-minute limit, but public comments were restricted during the cell tower hearing. 

“The idea of cutting to three minutes is always … attractive,” said Councilmember Bill Sauser, who was Mayor during both of those events. “However, [speaking at a Council meeting] is a hard thing to do for someone who has not practiced in it, or is not particularly outgoing to get up to that podium and speak.” 

Three minutes is the typical amount of allotted time for individual public comment in the state, Town Attorney Andy Morris said. Though the council does have the ability to adopt its own reasonable limits under the Brown Act. 

Earlier in the meeting, resident Sandy Hogan gave a presentation during public comment asking the Council to write a letter of concern on behalf of federal employees who may be phased out under the Trump Administration. She ran over the five-minute time period, and Sauser said people like Sandy deserve the full five minutes to share their thoughts, and that a few public comments don’t typically add much time to the agenda. 

“In our regular meetings, the five minutes really doesn’t get in our way,” he said. “I would like to see us come up with a way to limit [the time] when we’re dealing with a Victor the bear scenario.” 

Councilmember Amanda Rice said operating that way would be a bad look, and advocated for the three-minute restriction across the board for uniformity. 

“If we normally have it as five minutes and then, oh, it’s a controversial topic, we’re gonna cut it down to three minutes, I feel like you’re taking the wind out of people’s sails,” she said. 

Bubser backed her up, and said it’s easier to allot people more time when the crowd is small than to restrict the time because the crowd is big. 

 “When people come in with their passion plea, they have written their cards to be five minutes long, and it is much more challenging and disrespectful to have to cut that down,” she said. “That’s what’s really troubling to me, and I’ve never seen it anywhere else.”

Councilmember Brent Truax said he believed people should get the full five minutes, even in cases where there are a lot of speakers because allowing more time means the council will get higher quality responses from people. He also used Sandy Hogan’s comment as an example.

“It takes a little bit of time sometimes for people to compose their thoughts,” he said. 

He added that he’d looked through the number of times that the Mayor has had to interrupt a speaker over the last six months, and that the number “wasn’t a whole lot.” 

In response, Rice firmed up her position, and advocated again for a set standard of three minutes for more “equity.” Truax tried rebuttal, but Rice brought her index finger to her mouth and told him not to interrupt her. The two quibbled for a minute or two, repeating their original statements, until Councilmember John Wentworth jumped in with a motion. 

He proposed the warning light on the clerk’s clock go off at three minutes, and the stop light go off at five.

“The clock can’t do all that,” Town Clerk Jamie Gray said. She added that she was not looking for a motion, just consensus so that she could amend the resolution. 

Once that was straightened out, Bubser asked Wentworth why he wanted the red light to go off at five minutes, and not, say, 3:15 or 3:30. Five minutes still felt especially long to her.

“People are often just repeating the same six points that the last twelve people said,” Bubser said. “I find that to be a really poor use of our time, and so I would like us to have some structure around this.”

Wentworth said it was an issue of free speech, taking Truax and Sauser’s side. Sandy Hogan had left by this point, but Wentworth used her as an example for the third time. He said it’s not fair that someone like her should go out of their way just to be limited to three minutes.

“We have enough problems getting public engagement with these things,” he said. “And I think it sends a message to say, well, we’re just gonna cut it down.”

Sauser suggested a cut off time of four minutes in order to meet in the middle, and Bubser shut the suggestion down.

Wentworth eventually said he would support the three-minute limit in order to reach consensus, as did Truax. Sauser said this wasn’t a hill he was going to die on and that most people who speak don’t know two minutes from five minutes. 

The Council ultimately directed staff to revise a resolution to restrict public comment period to three minutes.