Supervisors Pass Resolution Hoping to Discourage a Persistent Gadfly

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors would like to call its meeting to order. Seriously.

By a vote of 3-2 Tuesday, the supervisors approved a resolution to “keep order and decorum” at its weekly meetings, which have in recent months been visited by a sharp-tongued tailor from South Los Angeles.

Supervisor Gloria Molina was particularly fed up with the gadfly in question, Merritt Holloway, who often seeks to address the board on 20 or more agenda items at a time. Over the last seven meetings, Holloway has held 214 items for public comment. (Molina counted them.)

The trouble was, every time the supervisors tried to stifle Holloway -- for example, by threatening to ban him from addressing them for 90 days -- the effort seemed to run afoul of rules that protect public comment at government meetings. Hence the resolution, which says that holding “an excessive number of items ... interferes with the orderly course of the meeting” and, furthermore, requests “that the public respect its process and not engage in this pattern of conduct.”

“It really doesn’t change much around here,” Molina acknowledged. “But it sets the tone.” Supervisors Don Knabe and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke agreed.

But Supervisor Mike Antonovich objected that the resolution “really doesn’t do anything” and complained about the half-hour spent debating it. “This whole exercise has taken more time than an individual who holds a number of items. It’s an assault on the 1st Amendment.”

“I hate to admit it, but I agree with Mr. Antonovich,” chimed in Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a liberal Democrat often at odds with his conservative Republican colleague. “The problem is that, under the law, people have a right to come up here and talk.”

Meanwhile, Holloway already had zoomed through 16 agenda items in the three minutes he was allotted. But the issue -- as Molina made clear -- was keeping control, not saving time.

“There are many things we do here,” she said curtly, “that waste the public’s time and our time.”