Op-Ed: When a City Turns Off the Camera During Public Comment, Free Speech Suffers

Living Snoqualmie has covered Valley communities since 2010. In those 16 years, we’ve reported on local government through changing councils, mayors and policies. Most of the time, our role is simply to report what happened. Some issues, however, reach beyond the facts of a single story because they concern the principles that shape how local government serves the public.

In September 2019, the Snoqualmie City Council voted 4-3 to turn off video recording during the open public comment period of council meetings. The vote came in response to a specific situation: a council candidate had been using footage from his public comments to create campaign videos.

The council, citing advice from the Public Disclosure Commission about the city’s potential liability, chose to eliminate video of public comment rather than manage individual violations as they occurred. Three council members opposed the move. Councilmember Shepard called it “nothing short of censorship.” The policy applied only to public comments on items not on the agenda.

Then, quietly, it stopped being enforced. For years, cameras stayed on during public comment. No one made an issue of it.

That changed earlier this year, when a new mayor took office, and the city began enforcing the 2019 policy again. The timing coincided with the most significant period of public engagement Snoqualmie had seen in years, as hundreds of residents packed council chambers to speak about a proposed battery energy storage facility adjacent to city limits. The camera went dark during their testimony.

What made the renewed enforcement harder to accept was what it revealed: when Living Snoqualmie asked for the governing document, the city could not produce one. The 2019 vote had been a procedural motion, not a resolution. It appeared in no official rules of procedure. The policy being enforced had no documented place in the city’s adopted rules of procedure.

What’s Lost Without Video

Residents watching a meeting from home can’t see a chamber full of neighbors. They can’t see council members’ faces and body language during minutes of impassioned testimony. They can’t see how many people showed up. Audio tells you what was said; video tells you the story of the night.

This is not just about one city or one controversy. Public comment is often described as an opportunity for residents to inform their elected officials. That framing is too narrow. When a community member stands at a podium to speak about something that affects their family, their neighborhood, their safety, that moment belongs to the whole community, not just the seven people sitting at the dais.

Video is how that happens for everyone who cannot be in the room. A parent with young children at home. A resident working a night shift. An elderly neighbor who cannot make the drive. They watch from their living rooms, and what they see is not just what is said. It is the faces of their neighbors, the size of the crowd, the weight of the moment. Audio preserves the words. Video preserves the record.

When the camera goes dark during public comment, the people in the room still get to speak. But the community watching from home loses something that cannot be recovered by reading a transcript or listening to an audio file the next day. They lose the experience of witnessing their community advocate for itself.

The justification offered for keeping the cameras off centered on a hypothetical: that a future council candidate might use meeting footage for campaign purposes, exposing the city to a PDC complaint. It is a real legal consideration. But it is also one that has never materialized. No complaint of this kind has ever been filed against Snoqualmie. No other nearby cities enforce a similar policy.

More to the point, the tools to address this concern already exist without turning off cameras. The mayor has authority to stop a meeting and its recording when participants do not follow the rules. And the city has since moved from YouTube Live to the Zoom Panelist platform, which allows footage to be edited before it is uploaded. The original technical justification no longer applies.

The 2019 vote was a blunt instrument aimed at a specific problem that no longer exists in its original form. Enforcing it in 2026, against a community showing up in record numbers to speak about a project near their homes and schools, was the wrong application of an already questionable policy.

At its July 27th meeting, the Snoqualmie City Council voted to restore video recording during public comment. Before the vote, Councilmember Murphy shared a written response he had received directly from the PDC: video recording itself does not create campaign finance exposure. The risk lies in what is said, not how it is recorded. The presiding officer’s existing authority to interrupt a speaker who violates the rules, PDC confirmed, is a sufficient safeguard. The original justification for turning off the cameras did not hold up.

Not everyone agreed. Councilmember Holloway, who voted against restoring video, said “it is not the responsibility of the council or the city to provide video broadcast of citizen’s opinion to the rest of the community.” Councilmembers Holloway and Johnson voted no. But the motion carried, and Councilmember Testman, appointed to the council just months earlier, perhaps said it best: “We can’t live in bubble wrap to do the people’s business. We’re in an age of cynicism — an age of citizens feeling there’s a lack of transparency at all levels of government. This is frankly the least we could do.”

The Snoqualmie City Council made the right decision in restoring video during public comment. But the months it took to get there, the packed chambers, the unanswered questions, and the enforcement of an undocumented policy are worth remembering. Not as a grievance, but as a reminder of what transparency actually requires. It requires being seen. It requires that when residents stand up to speak to their government, the community they represent can witness it. A city that understands transparency doesn’t need to be asked twice.