TRURO — The select board is no longer working on one of its goals and objectives for fiscal 2023, according to member Sue Areson: the implementation of a “civility pledge” to be read at the beginning of all meetings of the select board and appointed town boards, with elected boards being encouraged to read it aloud, too.
Areson was the designated “ambassador” for this objective. She presented a first draft of the pledge at a select board meeting last August and a revised version with more positive language in November.
A sentence that in August had read, “We want all citizens to express their views — without attacks or hostility,” for example, was amended in November to read, “We want everyone to express their views — while maintaining civility and mutual respect.”
Still, neither version won the select board’s support. Areson told the Independent that she had decided in November to stop working on the project.
“Members of the board weren’t comfortable reciting it,” she said.
At the August meeting, vice chair Bob Weinstein had said, “I have a great hesitation since I was accused of violating some kind of civility. I have never been uncivil. I think it’s important to engage in open, unfettered discussion.”
In March 2023, the state Supreme Judicial Court took a similar stance, declaring unconstitutional on both state and First Amendment grounds a civility bylaw that had been adopted in Southborough. The bylaw was challenged in court when Louise Barron, speaking in the public comment period at a select board meeting, called the chair “a Hitler” and he retorted that she was “disgusting.” The chair threatened to have Barron removed from the meeting.
The court ruled the bylaw infringed Barron’s right to free speech.
Even before that verdict, Areson had shifted gears: she has been working on a code of conduct for town officials rather than a civility pledge.
“I absolutely respect and adhere to the First Amendment,” she told the Independent. “But almost any speech is protected by the First Amendment. Does that mean you can stand up and go on a tirade and make personal attacks on people? Probably that would be protected in a court of law.”
Instead of policing comments by the public, Areson’s code of conduct aims to encourage decorum among town leaders, she said. “To me, it’s about self-restraint in speaking and actions, particularly for elected and appointed officials,” she said. “It’s about holding yourself to a higher standard.”
The code of conduct would consolidate and revise two existing policies, numbers 37 and 54, Areson said, so that if a town staff member, official, board member, or member of the public “feels like there’s been an infraction of any sort, it would spell out how that would be dealt with and what the consequences are.
“I don’t think anything gets done by yelling at each other,” she added.
The code of conduct will weave in some of the language from her proposed civility pledge and will serve as “sort of a courteous reminder to folks,” Areson said. It was not finalized in time for town meeting this spring, but she hopes to have a draft complete by the end of the fiscal year on June 30.
Mike Fee, a lawyer, Truro resident, and former Sudbury town moderator, said that both civility guidelines and codes of conduct should be “aspirational as opposed to legally binding.”
Respectful speech and behavior can be encouraged, he said, but not enforced. “I think municipal officials would have to tread very lightly so as not to find themselves in legal hot water by abridging somebody’s free speech rights,” he said.
Town boards in Massachusetts are not obligated to offer public comment periods, according to Justin Silverman, executive director of New England First Amendment Coalition. “But when they open that forum, the First Amendment kicks in, and any restrictions they put on speech have to abide by First Amendment principles,” he said.
Boards can limit public comments to what’s “reasonable,” Silverman said. Cutting off comments at a certain number of minutes is legal, as is mandating that they concern items on the meeting’s agenda. Beyond that, few restrictions would pass muster, he said.
During public comment sessions, Fee said, boards “open themselves up to comments that they don’t like or that cross the line in terms of decorum, but they cannot be the arbiters of what’s appropriate and what’s not if they allow that time.”
In a letter to the editor of the Independent published on March 30, Fee pointed out that town meetings operate under different rules, and moderators have authority to maintain decorum that town officials in other settings do not have.
This power was both acted on and tested at this spring’s town meetings. In Provincetown, Moderator Mary-Jo Avellar censured multiple speakers’ use of crude language. “It’s supposed to be civil discourse,” she told the Independent last month, saying she was “very disappointed with the way people conducted themselves.” At Truro’s town meeting, select board chair Kristen Reed raised multiple points of order imploring speakers to introduce themselves before making comments. “I know I’m being tedious this evening with procedure,” she said. “But if we don’t respect procedure, we start to fall out of decorum.”
Truro has enforced decorum before. In November 2020, the select board censured planning board member Peter Herridge for “violating town policies on honesty, integrity, and civility.”
“When we’re talking about public officials and whether their speech can be restricted,” Silverman said, “it’s a different conversation.”
Elected and appointed officials don’t shed their First Amendment rights during public meetings, Silverman said, “but they’re also a member of government, and their speech as a member of government affects the public differently because they’re in a position of power.”
In other words, the differences may appear semantic — but rules that bind those in power are different from demands for “civility” from the public.
“Civility has been about making sure that the status quo, the hierarchy of the status quo at the moment, which means racial inequality, gender inequality, class inequality, stays permanent,” argued Lynn Itagaki, associate professor at the University of Missouri, on an episode of NPR’s Civility Wars. Demands for civility can be a tool to exclude the less powerful or people who speak the “wrong way,” Itagaki said.
The boundaries of free speech remain contentious — and not only in Truro.
Areson’s proposed code of conduct should be up for discussion sometime in June.
