It’s not until the next-to-last paragraph of today’s Press-Telegram editorial — not surprisingly, anymore, but still sort of amazingly — against free speech at Long Beach City Council meetings that it becomes clear how a First Amendment-dependent newspaper could take such a position.  The P-T doesn’t really think the public’s point of view is worth very much.

After the Council took away the public’s historic right to remove, discuss and force a vote on items in the Consent Calendar — supposedly non-controversial issues grouped together by the Council and City Staff to be approved with one lump vote – the P-T shrugged thusly:

“There are many ways to put in your 2 cents: phone calls, e-mails, letters to the editors and blogs.”

Two cents?

A citizen has an interest in an issue before the Council — an issue the agenda describes in vague terms and the Council is dispensing without debate — and takes the time to come to a meeting and put his or her point of view into the public record (and force members of the Council to go on record, too) and the Press-Telegram values that at two cents? And compares it to “phone calls, e-mails, letters to the editor and blogs”?

Some members of the public had abused the old, free system, wasting time by pulling many items from the Consent Calendar for no apparent reason–although it’s significant that the P-T had to reach back several years to find the most-egregious of those abuses.

But the Council has abused the Consent Calendar, too–LBreport.com has assembled a few of the many times City Hall has misused the Consent Calendar procedure to try to conceal important items in hopes of avoiding public discussion. Sadly, that sneaky technique just got a lot easier.

Don’t like it? Maybe you could blog about it.

Tags: Consent calendar, free speech, Long Beach City Council, Mayor Bob Foster, Press-Telegram editorial, two cents worth