Starting next month, Long Beach residents can start telling elected leaders how they feel about their policies and agenda items from the comfort of their homes.
The Long Beach City Council is set to restore a phone-in public comment system during its meetings. Starting with its next session on July 21, they will allow live, virtual comments.
State law requires the change by July 1, bringing back pandemic-era electronic access that lawmakers say is a critical function of local governance: hearing from constituents.
The system isn’t live yet, but those interested in calling in will have to sign up on a link provided at the top of each City Council agenda. (Find them here.) Once signed up, speakers will enter a Zoom webinar where they’re asked only to provide a name, though it doesn’t have to be their real name.
From there, viewers can join a live feed of the meeting with closed captions. When the city clerk announces it is time to speak, virtual attendees must use the raise-hand feature, which officials use to tally the number of speakers. Public comment will then follow, with callers being unmuted when it’s their time to speak.
These virtual comments will be allowed on each item, as well as during the two general public comment periods at the start and end of the meeting. For the first general period — reserved for topics not on the agenda — a cap of 10 speakers applies, split evenly between five in-person attendees and five remote callers.
Long Beach City Clerk Monique DeLaGarza said the system will have safeguards that bar speakers from unmuting themselves or using the chat function — as a way to limit disruption.
If any technical issues arise, the new rules say the council must recess for up to an hour to fix them. If the system cannot be restored, the council will vote on whether to adjourn the meeting altogether.
Long Beach is no stranger to remote public comment. The city first offered call-in access in June 2020, three months after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic forced City Hall to close. At the time, the system required a staffed phone bank, with city clerk employees wearing headsets and walking callers through the process in both English and Spanish.
The service was suspended in late 2021, briefly reinstated during the Omicron surge in January 2022, then shut down that September.
“Technology has come a long way since the pandemic,” DeLaGarza said. “A lot of people have learned a lot of hard lessons since then with telephonic public comment. So it’s not going to operate the same.”
Despite the end of pandemic-era iterations, new state legislation passed in October that forces cities of a certain size to revive similar systems. State lawmakers argued that local governance should be easy to access, that constituents should be able to address elected officials without fighting traffic — by car or multiple-bus trips — and missing out on other obligations to sit in a crowded room — sometimes for hours — to speak.
It’s also a boost for people with mobility limitations, who might otherwise have difficulty attending public meetings.
In Long Beach, several details remain unresolved ahead of the July 21 launch. Staff has yet to determine how it will prioritize and order speakers between those attending in person and those calling in remotely.
More pressingly, officials are still working out how to identify remote callers who need translation services, given that no private communication channel exists between city staff and participants inside the Zoom. One possibility under consideration would ask callers to add a notation to their display name to flag a need for an interpreter.
Should someone begin speaking in Khmer, Tagalog, Spanish or another language without having indicated that need, DeLaGarza said interpreters stationed in the chamber would be able to step in.
As part of the new system, the council asked for city staff to come back in six months with a report on how the call-in feature is being used and how it’s affecting meetings.