By admin 
A hot microphone moment at Tuesday’s Sacramento City Council meeting is exploding into anger directed against the two caught in the act: Vice Mayor Karina Talamantes and Mayor Kevin McCarty, who were seemingly discussing how to ban people from a public meeting.
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But people too often forget to take a step back and examine the moment in context. The hot mic moment didn’t capture an attempt to remove people from their public chambers. Rather, it was a discussion of protocol to remove a single audience member who was being disruptive and shouting down other members of the public who had the right to come there to speak.
Now, the moment has gone viral on local social media sites, accompanied by some untenable threats and abuse being hurled at Talamantes and McCarty.
And, as always, the real story behind the moment is far more interesting.
Mayor McCarty, with roughly 18 months in his role, clearly prefers to look at his phone during meetings and isn’t as well versed as he should be on council meeting rules — a dangerous prospect for a leader who is supposed to be running the meetings.
Talamantes was trying to explain the protocol of removing a disruptive person at the meeting to McCarty. It’s a complicated process exactly because the council is from attending council meetings. Removal requires a series of warnings. Additionally, the removal only lasts the length of the meeting, and someone removed for being disruptive is allowed to return — so it’s hardly a ban. (It’s also a more recent rule that was made by McCarty’s predecessor, Darrell Steinberg, which may help explain why the new mayor is unfamiliar with it.)
So the moment where Talamantes appears to be trying to ban someone is actually her correctly stating the rules. Online outrage is taking her out of context. There were multiple, insurmountable disruptions in the meeting caused by one person. The mayor wasn’t following the council’s legal protocols to remove that person, and Talamantes was informing the mayor of what he needed to do.
“As a forum for public discussion, the City Council wants all voices to be heard,” Talamantes said in a statement to me. “As a Mayor and Council, we need to do a better job in maintaining decorum and civility in the City of Sacramento Council chambers. It must be a respectful place to conduct the people’s business.”
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“There are protocols in place per California’s Brown Act and the City’s Council Rules of Procedures that govern how we do business when it comes to disruptions in the chambers,” she continued. “My goal is to ensure everyone gets the opportunity to address the Mayor and Council in a safe and productive way.”
However, the moment was almost certainly exacerbated by the larger context of the vote the council had just taken.
The council voted 5-2 to approve nearly $800,000 in funding to help staff the Central California Intelligence Center, an item that had prompted community pushback regarding the CCIC’s alleged data-sharing practices with federal immigration enforcement. Talamantes and McCarty both voted yes.
So tempers were running hot in the audience, and through that lens it’s easy to see why there were shouts and disruptions. That was a horrible decision by a council that has promised to keep our city a sanctuary for those targeted by the current federal administration. The vote was a betrayal of that promise and yet another tally in the column of all the times the Sacramento City Council has bent to the demands of law enforcement.
Both sides were right, both sides were wrong. The world is rarely black and white, and our hair-trigger political climate — not to mention our social media addiction to short-form videos — tramples any understanding of the gray areas inherent in politics.
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