Photo Illustration By Yanelli Z. Robles / Staff
By Yanelli Z. Robles
Three minutes on the clock and time ticking away.
It is not crunch time at a basketball game that has some Southwestern College Governing Board members calling for a foul. A recent 3-2 decision to limit all speakers to three minutes has trustees arguing whether shorter meetings in the name of efficiency are unfairly limiting the Constitutional right to free speech.
Trustees Don Dumas, Kristine Galicia-Brown and Roberto Alcantar supported a new policy that reduced the time for all speakers – including the board – from five minutes to three. Board members Robert Moreno and Corina Soto voted against it.
“It’s about the efficiency of the meetings,” said Dumas. “A survey went out to every constituent group and we heard back in December of 2022 that the length of the meetings were too long.”
Constituent groups at SC include a small number of leaders of the faculty, classified and administrator unions and other interest groups. Alcantar said three minutes was time enough.
“We don’t need time to speak that much,” he said. “We are limiting ourselves so that we can keep the meetings efficient.”
Alcantar said the time limit will allow trustees to focus on the “most important issues” and will encourage more people to attend meetings.
“I’m a big believer in bringing government to people and having people more involved with government,” he said. “More people will come out to the meetings because the time commitment is a lot lower.”
Soto disagreed. She said there is no empirical evidence that shorter board meetings lead to larger audiences. People frequently attend meetings to exercise their right to address their elected officials.
“We need to have as much speech as possible,” she said. “We need to have dialog and we need to have these conversations.”
Soto said she worked at Southwestern College for more than 30 years as a counselor and professor. She questioned why after three decades there is a new rule limiting the time for community members to address the board. Trustees also needed time to speak directly to the voters, she said.
Soto called the move “Machiavellian” and said three of the trustees are trying to silence her.
“There are going to be disagreements and differences of opinion because that’s the nature of an educational institution,” she said. “If you don’t have that, you have a Potemkin village.”
(A Potemkin Village is a reference to fake villages that were only facades built to fool a Russian Czarina into believing there were more people and infrastructure than actually existed.)
Soto, who was censured by the board last August, said Dumas and Alcantar do not appreciate her often-dissenting points of view. She accused them of “mansplaining” and other disrespectful behavior.
Dumas rejected the notion.
“There are all sorts of ways people can voice their concerns to the board members without speaking for an extended period of time,” he said. “The meetings and public comment are not the only way to get in touch with a board member. You can email a board member or meet with a board member (in private).”
Trustee Moreno voted to censure Soto but voted with her on the time limit issue. He said the board, in the spirit of the First Amendment, should not prevent or limit free speech and the Constitutional right to redress elected officials. He said some of his constituents in National City and low income communities may not have the technology Dumas described.
“Not everyone (in National City), unfortunately, has access to (the technology) to send emails or to telephones to get hold of me,” he said.
Attending meetings, Moreno said, is often the only way for him to dialogue with some members of the community he represents.
“ I don’t think our students should face time limits,” he said. “If (constituents) need to say whatever they need to say, they (should be able to) take as long as they need because we are here for them. Governing board meetings are my platform to communicate (with) the public and to let the community know what I’ve been up to as a member.”
Soto asked Tristan Sims, the college’s lawyer, to advise the board majority against the three minute limit based on previous court rulings that favored free speech rights. She said three minutes was not enough time for her to discuss and ask questions about important college issues such as bond expenditures, the conduct of commencement ceremonies and a proposal to build dorms on the grounds of the Chula Vista campus.
“When is the governing board (supposed) to govern?” she asked.
Khrystan Policarpio of the First Amendment Coalition, a free speech advocacy organization, indicated that the governing board likely adopted the proposal in a legal manner, but was less clear on whether a time limit itself is legal or advisable. The 1981 Parker v. Merlino case supports the concept of legislative bodies adopting “rules of parliamentary procedure to enable it to…function in an efficient manner.”
The 2009 Mobley v. Tarlini case added nuance to the issue. Mobley upheld the concept that Roberts Rules of Order permits a time limitation for speech by city council members, but also holds open the possibility that a legislative body may violate free speech rights if rules “amount(ed) to viewpoint-based discrimination” against a speaker.
Soto contents that her watchdog-style of leadership attempts to hold the governing board accountable to the community. Attempts to limit her time to speak are not based on bettering efficiency, she said, but are instead “another effort to keep me quiet” about topics “we may not agree on.” She said Dumas, Alcantar and Galicia-Brown have taken control of the board and have “sidelined” her and Moreno.
“The three governing board members who currently run the district seem to have little if any desire to govern (at Southwestern College),” she said. “They seem to be content with rubber stamping and favoring the status quo.”
