Rudy Rudolph was on Carmi City Council's agenda Tuesday night to talk about his "Ordinance Y" that he had previously distributed to the Council. Ordinance Y basically outlines and defines safeguards for public comments while at the same time recognizing the rights and responsibilities of government entities, who are also citizens. The following is the entire speech Rudolph made to the Council.
"Mayor, members of the council, and everyone here tonight, I want to begin with something that I plainly stated, that I think most of you already know. I'm angry. I have been angry. I've raised my voice. I have walked out of City Hall furious, and I have gone home, spent hour after hour reading statutes, attorney general opinions, emails, minutes, ordinances, FOIA responses, and public records, because I cannot understand why getting straightforward answers from our own government has become so difficult.
"But my anger is not Ordinance Y. My anger is part of the reason Ordinance Y had to be written, because government cannot judge the rights of its citizens by whether those citizens are calm enough, pleasant enough, agreeable enough, or convenient enough to hear. Over the last several weeks, I've learned how quickly an ordinary resident can be forced into the language of lawyers simply for asking ordinary questions: Who knew what? When did they know it? Where are the emails? Where are the records? What do the cameras capture? Who made the decision? Under what authority? Those are not radical questions. They are questions people ask when government acts in their name and spends their money.
"Yet the path to answers has repeatedly meant: FOIA requests, preservation notices, statutory deadlines, and requests for reviews. We should not have to turn basic public information into a legal contest. A city that believes in transparency should make the truth easier to reach, not harder to pursue. That is why Ordinance Y matters. This is not a personal shield for me, and it is not a weapon against this council. It is a set of rules meant to outlast all of us. It says that public comment belongs to the public, while still recognizing that the council has legitimate duty to conduct an orderly meeting. It gives each speaker a defined amount of time. It prevents people from stacking or yielding time to take over the floor. It allows intervention when someone truly prevents the meeting from continuing.
"At the same time, it makes a distinction that should never be blurred. Criticism is not disruption. Disagreement is not disruption. Naming a public official is not disruption. An accusation is not automatically a disruption. A raised voice is not automatic disruption. An offensive language standing alone is not the same thing as material obstructing the business of the meeting. That distinction is the heart of this ordinance because the danger begins when the people being criticized are also given unlimited discretion to decide whether the criticism itself is acceptable. If decorum can mean whatever the presiding officer decides in the moment, then the public comment stops being a right, and it becomes a permission. The person at the podium is no longer protected by a rule. That person is protected only by the patience of the official holding the gavel.
"Ordinance Y replaces that discretion with standards. It requires real disruption before the strongest enforcement measures are used. It requires a clear warning in ordinary circumstances. It requires the rule being violated to be identified. It requires enforcement be based on conduct rather than viewpoint. Those are not anti-government provisions. Those are safeguards that protect the legitimacy of the government itself. The same principle has guided the public record work I have been doing.
"The strongest request for for review we prepared did not simply declare that somebody had hidden something. They ask that what was searched, what custodians were consulted, which accounts and devices were checked, which systems were reviewed, and whether the search was reasonably calculated to find records that were requested. That is important because I do not want a system that asks everybody to take my word for it. I do not want a system that asks everybody to take the City's word for it either. I want a system where the record is strong enough to answer the question.
"If I am wrong, let the evidence prove me wrong. If the City is right, let the evidence prove the city right. If the city is wrong, then the public deserves the same honest record capable of showing that too. That is why I've also pushed for meeting recording and public and preservation of public recordings."
Rudolph asked for a motion from the council to put Ordinance Y on next month's agenda and received no response. No other comments were made and the meeting was adjourned.
