Amidst a state legislative change about public comments, the White County Board of Education will make minor revisions to its public comment policy.
Public comments must be limited to issues within the jurisdiction of the board. The White County Board enacted a 30-minute total time limit with three minutes per person for public comments per meeting. District 5 Board Member Jayson McDonald said the board has never limited time for an individual public speaker and have rarely ever exceeded 30 minutes for public comment during his tenure.
“I’m in favor of keeping the speaker’s time to three minutes,” McDonald said. “I believe we have been very diligent in limiting that time to the three minutes we’ve had in our policy before. I think every speaker that has come has very mindful of that.”
The new policy will affect appeals, appearances and public comments in front of the board as they adopt the new language of the state.
“I do like the fact that we put a time limit for the total,” District 1 Board Member Lisa Officer said. “I definitely want to be open for people to talk about us. Three to five minutes is fine. But we do, I think, have a finite line there. For some subjects, some people could talk, and talk, and talk.”
The board ruled the Chairman can choose to extend public comment time if needed, and public speakers added to the consent agenda as a board item will not have a time limit.
“I think we will discover what time is reasonable the more we get into this,” Chairman Bob Young said.
“As a board, we should not take action on items that just come up in the public comment period, because at that point in time, we would be making decisions without the opportunity to properly review the information,” Young said.
