Public returns to San Diego City Council meetings April 11 after 2-year absence

San Diego will allow members of the public to resume attending City Council meetings in person April 11, just over two years after all city meetings were shifted online because of the pandemic.

Since January, council members and city staff have had the option of participating in person at council meetings. But members of the public have been forced to continue using Zoom and phone calls to participate.

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San Diego was the last large California city with no in-person participation at council meetings. Members of the public will continue to be allowed to participate by Zoom and by phone — options not allowed before the pandemic.

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“San Diegans deserve to have direct access to their city government and providing in-person and online access to City Council meetings is one of the best ways to achieve this,” said Council President Sean Elo-Rivera, who has final say on such decisions. “I look forward to the public returning to City Hall as we continue to work toward creating a more transparent, more accessible democracy.”

It was unclear Friday whether the resumption of in-person attendance at meetings will be extended to council committee meetings, or whether it will be restricted only to meetings of the full council.

A spokesman for Elo-Rivera said Friday that he could not provide an answer to that question. Since January, council members and city staff have been allowed to attend some committee meetings, but not others.

Neighborhood leader Paul Kreuger said it has taken San Diego too long to allow the public to go face-to-face with their elected leaders. But he praised Elo-Rivera for finally making the change.

“Only when we are face-to-face do we know if they are listening to our concerns,” said Kreuger, a Talmadge resident and member of Neighbors for a Better San Diego. “On Zoom meetings, we have no idea if they are even paying attention. And they can’t even see our faces — they can only hear our voices.”

Jonathan Freeman, leader of a pedestrian advocacy group called Safe Walkways, hailed the shift. But he also said it’s crucial for in-person attendance to be extended to committee meetings as soon as possible.

“This is great news — people can look their representatives in the eye and let them see how they feel,” Freeman said. “When you have public comment on Zoom, you can only make your point via voice and not via video.”

Freeman said, however, that committee meetings are often the best opportunity for community leaders and critics to successfully get legislation or policies changed. When something has reached the full council, it may be too late, he said.

“Key issues typically come to committee first, when they are still in flux, so that’s when you need to be in person,” he said. “At committee, you can make big changes and maybe even get them to send the idea back to staff and start over.”

Kreuger said he hopes the city also revives a pre-pandemic policy of allowing speakers to donate their unused speaking time to other speakers who share their opinions.

Before the pandemic, anyone attending a meeting in person could donate their time to another speaker.

When the city switched to Zoom meetings, that policy was eliminated because no one could attend in person, so no one was eligible to donate time.

Some critics say attending a Zoom council meeting should make someone eligible to donate time, but city officials haven’t budged. It’s not clear whether resuming in-person meetings will mean reviving the option of donating time.

“It allows organized groups that feel strongly about a particular issue to make their argument in one cogent presentation,” Krueger said. “It also helps the council hear an entire perspective, instead of that perspective being broken up among multiple speakers not speaking consecutively.”

Kreuger said in-person meetings harken back to the founding of our nation.

“Politics is best done when people can see and hear each other,” he said.

After being Zoom-only at the start of the pandemic, San Diego tried a hybrid approach, with staff and some council members allowed to participate in person, for a short time in the middle of 2020. But officials went to virtual-only meetings in fall 2020 and didn’t resume any in-person participation until this January.

The city’s recent changes comes in the wake on a new state law, Assembly Bill 361, which makes it harder for local governments to continue meeting online-only.

In March 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom gave cities permission to violate state laws governing open meetings during the pandemic by holding the meetings online.

The new law allows that to continue, but it requires cities to evaluate new circumstances every 30 days and possibly shift back to in-person participation. To limit meetings to online-only, a government agency must determine there are “imminent risks to the health or safety of attendees.”

The council is scheduled to vote Tuesday on Elo-Rivera’s plan to resume in-person participation by the public. A staff report says the change will happen unless there are “unforeseen circumstances.”