Readers who’ve spent time before city or county councils may know how lawless these bodies can sometimes be. Many hold “public” meetings without announcing the time or place, disregard laws on raising taxes and the appropriation of public money, hide the details of procurement contracts and incentive deals, and move to “executive session” any time they don’t want the public to hear what they say.
The trend has worsened, by our reckoning, with the collapse of local newspapers. There was a day not long ago when a reporter or two might cover a small or mid-sized city’s council meetings. No more. The meetings are streamed online, but hardly anyone watches.
So we were heartened to read about a persistent Floridian named Fane Lozman, the victor in a recent Supreme Court decision. Lozman is a resident of Riviera Beach, Florida. He had already won a Supreme Court case in 2013, when the justices ruled 7-2 that the city had misused federal admiralty law to seize and destroy his floating house, then docked in the Riviera Beach marina.
Lozman used a freedom-of-information request to obtain minutes of an “executive session” meeting in which councilors openly discussed ways to threaten and intimidate him. At the next council meeting, during the segment in which members of the public were allowed to speak, Lozman rose to address the council, whereupon a councilman called for a police officer to escort him out of the room. When he refused to leave, he was arrested.
He sued and lost, but appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Riviera Beach city council had violated his First Amendment right to speak to the council. That gives him grounds to sue the city for $230,000 in legal fees, which he’ll likely win. “I’ve heard horror stories from all over the country,” Lozman said after the decision; “people call me and they say they were physically thrown out of meetings. If you go on YouTube there’s lots of people being dragged out by elected officials, and I wanted to stop that.”
Lozman v. Riviera Beach won’t stop it, but it just might make rogue councilors hesitate before ordering cops to arrest citizens for asking troublesome questions.
