The Ellsworth City Council suggested at a Monday meeting that it might eliminate the ability for citizens to comment at their council meetings after they said comments from former conservative City Council candidate John Linnehan violated their rules.
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City Council Chair Michelle Beal said on Monday that she believes the council will no longer allow citizens to comment on general council business at their meetings.
“I think we’ll be taking this off the agenda from now on,” said Beal.
Beal’s comment came in response to Linnehan’s remarks, which the council interrupted multiple times.
Citizens are permitted to speak on matters relevant to the council for three minutes, but Beal and other councilors cut Linnehan off multiple times.
They believed his speech violated their rules against using the public comment section of the meeting for “politicking,” and constituted political campaigning.
Linnehan, who was cut off for the same reason in the two previous council meetings, began his speech by reading the First Amendment of the Constitution and suggested that the councilors violated his constitutional right to free speech by cutting him off.
“My constitutional political speech rights have been violated for the last two monthly council meetings, contradicting many unanimous federal court precedents,” said Linnehan.
The Council let Linnehan speak uninterrupted as he accused them of violating his rights and allowed him to continue as he proposed a way to lower the city’s property taxes.
They eventually cut him off when he began listing the names of three specific council members whom he wants voted out of office when they are up for re-election in November 2025.
Although Linnehan did not explicitly suggest himself as a replacement, he has run for the council previously.
He continued speaking through the complaints before agreeing to skip to the end and avoid the issue.
He then continued speaking on the exact same topic and continued calling for the three council members to be ousted and replaced with fiscally conservative and constitutionally minded candidates.
His preferred replacement candidate closely matches the description of himself that he provides to the public.
Linnehan describes himself on his website as a “Maine first patriot, a Christian, a constitutionalist, a conservative, and a patriot.”
The similarity between Linnehan’s description of himself and that of his ideal councilor suggests that the council’s concerns about him using his comments for political gain are not entirely unfounded.
He did not deny that his comments could be considered “politicking,” but maintained that the First Amendment protects his right to speak politically at the meeting.
Two other groups of three people each gave their comments after Linnehan and went uninterrupted.
Not every council member was in favor of stopping all citizens from speaking at the meetings just because they disliked Linnehan’s comments.
“I want to remind the council that it’s three minutes, and if you get rid of citizen comments, you would get rid of the other two presentations that we all learned a lot about,” said Councillor Steve O’Halloran.
“Maybe sitting quietly for three minutes and listening to everybody’s subject matter might not be liked, but I would hate to block out the good, just to block out one,” said O’Halloran.
He urged the council not to let their animosity towards Linnehan prevent them from allowing the whole town to voice their opinions to the council.
Beal then doubled down on her criticism of Linnehan and argued that allowing him to speak could inspire others to comment on matters irrelevant to the council during public comments.
“You are opening it up to other types of the, of the same discussions right now it’s one person with three minutes of non-council business, what’s it going to be if you just continue to allow it” said Beal.
After further discussion, Beal admitted that completely abolishing the citizen comment section of the meetings is “not a done deal,” and she did not say when the issue will be officially decided.
Watch John Linnehan pitch Constitution Hall:
Dolts, why even have the meetings? Why not just meet in Michelle’s basement and have a big circle jerk where you can tell each other about how wonderful you are and how stupid voters are. Personally I don’t think there’s enough raw material have a successful circle jerk. Who votes for these morons?
What comes next, take a walk into these showers!!
Funny, before even reading the artical and seeing Elsworth in the heading, I thought of John