I’ve had it with all these kooks at my motherf**king meeting!

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Pax Arcana

Via Universal Hub (Ed Note: Actually this link is not via Universal Hub but go check them out regardless. PA forgets where he found this link. Sorry actual awesome original linker!) the Cambridge Chronicle today posted a thoroughly amusing rundown of that city council’s difficulty running a meeting when faced with the ever-present scourge of local kooks with something to say.

As former local reporters, Perry Ellis and I promise you this problem is not unique to Cambridge. Every town is full of un-self-aware crazies who use public meetings as a forum to vent whatever scrambled signals care to tumble out of their shallow brain pans.

The problem seems especially acute in Cambridge, however:

Bercaw speaks before almost every City Council meeting. He has been known to use his three minutes for everything from rants on homosexuality and proposals to make the streets into parks to theories on cuttlefish. Bercaw also gives himself a new, humorous but fake title every time he speaks. On Monday, he told city councilors he was representing the Society for the Advancement of Typical White Persons.

On more than one occasional, the pols have had to call the cops:

About a year ago, former Mayor Ken Reeves called in the police in an attempt to remove regulars Elie Yarden and Kathy Podgers from the meeting chambers. (Neither was arrested nor removed.) Reeves cut off Yarden about a minute into his speech, ordering Yarden keep his comments to topics on the meeting’s agenda. Reeves banged his gavel and called the police after Yarden shouted his demands to have his three minutes.

At the same meeting, City Councilor Marjorie Decker and Podgers had a standoff after Podgers refused Decker’s request to watch the meeting with her service dog from a television outside the chambers. (Decker said she was suffering from allergies.) Podgers, a former City Council candidate, who is known for her obsession with sidewalks and measuring their handicapped compliance, has said she needs her Siberian husky named Shannon because she suffers from cervical and spinal radiculitis and liver disease.

Local officials — who just want to get home and watch The Biggest Loser like the rest of us — often find themselves wedged between the 1st Amendment and ten tons of crazy when they propose capping speech time at public meetings. So when the mayor of Cambridge suggested even-tighter limitations on public ranting (speeches are already limited to 3 minutes and must be related to a subject on the night’s agenda), the whackjobs reacted with typical aplomb:

During his three minutes Monday, City Council regular Roy Bercaw speculated that public comments during the meetings weren’t very interesting because he and the other regular speakers are “volunteers,” unlike the city councilors, who make a city salary.

“If you want better comments, you’re going to have to pay for it,” said Bercaw, eliciting snickers from the spectators attending the meeting and even a stifled smirk from Vice Mayor Brian Murphy, who was running the meeting in the absence of Mayor Denise Simmons.

Well played, whackjobs. Well played.

Mayor questions whether public should be quiet [Cambridge Chronicle]

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