The Town of Payson Common Council met on February 26, 2025, at 4:00 p.m. in the Town Hall Council Chambers. The meeting included a contentious public meetings presentation, public comments, a mid-year budget update, a presentation on Interim Public Management (IPM) contracts, updates from ADOT on Highway 87 and 260 projects, approval of a dispatch services agreement, discussion of council policy revisions, and a request to rescind prior authorization to demolish Taylor Pool. The meeting recessed into executive session at 8:10 p.m. and adjourned at 9:59 p.m.
For the invocation. Eric Anderson, state president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. How would you please step to the podium? Oh, that's very standard. Huh? Very standing in proxy for I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But also he's a counselor from the state presence. Our most kind and loving Heavenly Father, we humbly bow to thee this day. Grateful for our many blessings. We are indeed grateful for thy son Jesus Christ, our Savior. We're grateful for his life and for his example. We're grateful for his atoning sacrifice for us. Father, we're grateful for these beautiful wooded mountains which thou has provided for us. We're thankful for this free nation for the rights and privileges it grants to us. We're grateful for these leaders here today. We pray that that would bless them with wisdom and knowledge, bless them with thy spirit as they make important decisions. Bless them that they'll be able to avoid the temptations of the evil one. No, I think they got me. We had several questions arise after the last meeting about sort of what are the parameters within state law, also within council policy, having to do with public comments and also disruptions in meetings. So this is going to be somewhat high level, just so that we're not here for hours, right? Because we could talk about the First Amendment for a very long time. So I'm just going to give you a little bit of a framework of sort of First Amendment itself, and then how that intersects with the call to the public and then meeting disruptions. Okay, so a First Amendment overview. So the test of whether the government has unconstitutionally abridged the freedom of speech depends on the type of forum that this where the speech occurred. And this is very important. So there are there's a forum analysis that all the courts, the Supreme Court has examined over the years. So there's four categories of forums. You can have a non-public, right? So there's no public forum at all, a traditional public forum, a designated public forum, and a limited public forum. So quintessential sort of public forums that we sort of think about when we think about First Amendment are government controlled property, like parks, streets, sidewalks, right? When you think of protests on the street, that's kind of what you think about when you think about First Amendment. It's important to note though that even though someone might be lawfully protesting on the street, exercising their First Amendment rights, that doesn't predict uh protect against illegal conduct, right? You can't you know cause criminal damage, assault someone, that conduct is still criminal under our laws. So it's about the speech that's protected. So that's the sort of traditional, I think, public forum we think of. The designated public forum is where the government intentionally creates a space for public discussion, so like as a meeting space in the library. You can go rent a space, you can have those types of uh opportunities for discussion. For a limited public forum, this is where the government makes its property available to certain class of speakers or limited to certain topics. So, for example, the public comment section, right? For a call to the public is a limited public forum. So we'll talk about that more. So when we have call to the public on the agenda, as we all know, right? Open meeting law requires that we can't talk about anything unless it's agendized. So call to the public is agendized, and when you have that uh opportunity for the public to speak, then that's their time to speak. And the only other time they can speak is when we have specific agendized items, and then in the mayor's discretion, he allows speakers to talk about that specific topic. So those are the only two occasions where we have basically the public right to speak at a meeting because the purpose of the meeting, this meeting and other town council meetings, work sessions, anything like that, is to conduct town business, right? It isn't the same forum as like on a sidewalk where maybe you're protesting, you're exercising different types of First Amendment speech. So the public only has the right to speak during the call to the public, and then again after sort of each individual topic if they're gonna speak on that specific topic. But we're still also restricted.