City of Camas may nix address requirement

The Camas City Council is expected to pass a resolution this month that would help protect the privacy of people who provide public comments during public city meetings.

If approved, the new resolution would require people who speak during the council’s public comments period — or provide written comments — give their city of residence, but would make giving a physical street address optional.

Councilmembers discussed the issue during their Jan. 18 workshop and will likely vote on the resolution during the Feb. 7 council meeting.

The city’s interim city administrator, Jeff Swanson, told councilmembers on Jan. 3, that some people had “expressed concern about giving their address when offering public comment on the record.”

Councilman Greg Anderson said city officials would still need to know if the people commenting on a Camas-specific issue were residents of the city, and added that there are some addresses in the area that have Camas postal addresses but are, in reality, not in the city limits.

“There is a concern that we may be listening and acting on some city problem only to find out, whoops, that’s a Vancouver or Washougal problem,” Anderson said during the council’s Jan. 3 workshop.

Swanson returned to the council on Jan. 18, with a resolution stating that any person speaking during the public comment portion of a city meeting — or providing a written or electronic public comment –would have to state their name and city of residence for the record and could also choose to provide a full street address.

The council agreed to move the language and the resolution on to the Feb. 7 city council meeting.

The resolution will amend a set of public comment rules passed by the council in March 2020, after a few Camas residents pushed for more open, “two-way” interactions between the council and the public during meetings. The majority of councilmembers voting on the resolution in 2020 felt that allowing this type of back-and-forth dialogue between citizens and councilmembers had a tendency to derail council meetings and that councilmembers could, as Councilman Don Chaney said in 2020, “lose the structure and the purpose of the meetings.”

In the end, the council passed a resolution allowing each speaker three minutes’ worth of public speaking time during public comments windows at the beginning and end of each council workshop and regular meeting.