Pinal County and Free Speech Call to the Public
SBINSIDER NEWS\ANALYSIS | December 8th, 2024
The Pinal County Board of Supervisors (BOS) has for many years allowed any member of the public to step up to the microphone and address the BOS and by the magic live video feed, to anyone in the world with an internet connection. Before the BOS was transformed in 2012, the then three member board scheduled the “call to the public” to appear at the end of the regular agenda. Somewhere along the line, the BOS decided to move that portion of the meeting to near the beginning, thereby allowing the public access before getting worn out by the rest of the mostly boring agenda items.
State law does not require the BOS call to be a part of the regular agenda. Purely at their discretion. The Pinal BOS has limited each speaker to three minutes and has set some boundaries, mainly that the topic brought up by the speaker be relevant to topics that can be addressed by the BOS.
As they say in politics, no good deed goes unpunished.
Over the last decade, disgruntled, angry, left-wing speakers regularly appeared at the meetings to vent their spleens over Trump, conservatives, perceived racism and all of the usual Left wing victimology. It is an absurdity which apparently is lost on these speakers in that they will change no one’s minds regarding 99% of the topics upon which they bloviate. Roberto Reveles is one of the regulars who has a career of failed political campaigns and plays the most self-righteous of the bunch. He is oppressed by nearly everyone and wants in fact, needs, the world to know how “smart” he is. Reveles has publicly admitted to his Marxist orientation. Of late, the salient topic drawing these flies is “Project 2025″, a document put out by the Heritage Foundation and disavowed by President-elect Trump. No matter, these victims are confident that Trump will create a Christian Nationalist country using Project 2025 as its blue-print.
A month ago, Chairman Goodman decided he had enough, after one of the speakers attacked the Latter-Day Saints Church, of which he is a member. In a fiery retort, he made it clear that the BOS would not tolerate bigotry of any kind being expressed at the meeting. It was a bit late in the game as up until then, it seemed everyone from Sheriff Lamb to every member of the Board was fair game. He also stated that the BOS would re-visit the current policy for the open call and perhaps modify it. He did move the public call to a later spot on the agenda so that the more prosaic items could be addressed expeditiously, but that has not stopped the whiners.
There were a few conservative voices that occasionally appeared too, but mostly in response to the Left-wing onslaught. But they retreated after Goodman’s outburst.
In January, a new BOS will be seated with Rich Vitiello joining the group. They can decide whether to keep the current structure, get rid of it entirely or modify the speakers latitude. SBINSIDER is all for free speech, but the First Amendment does not require any governmental level to provide a platform for speech of any kind. By dropping the open call to the public, nothing would be harmed in our free speech rights, as every item on the BOS agenda already has a provision for public comment.
SBINSIDER urges the BOS to permanently remove the “call to the public” agenda item permanently and let the fabulists use other means to spew their tripe.
