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Date: 10/21/02 Item: VIII. A. Reports/RecommendAtions Thursday, October 17, 2002 To: Neal Beets From: Joel Jamnik Subject: Public use of City Council chambers/City meeting rooms. The Council has asked staff to research and report on the possible adoption or modification of city policies allowing public use of City meeting rooms, including City Council chambers. I'he City is specifically authorized by state law to adopt policies governing the use of public buildings. M.S. 412.221, Subd. 3 provides as follows: "Buildings. The council shall have power to construct or acquire structures needed for city purposes, to control, protect, and insure the public buildings, property, and records." As a governmental unit, the city is required to exercise the above authority within constitutional guidelines or constraints. The constitutional test employed by the Courts depends first and foremost on the type of building or public facility involved. As the Court recently stated in a case involving the Chicago park system, "the standards that we apply to determine whether a State has unconstitutionally excluded a private speaker from use of a public forum depend on the nature of the forum....If the forum is a traditional or open public forum, the State's restrictions on speech are subject to stricter scrutiny than are restrictions in a limited public forum." In other words, it depends on the nature of the forum that is involved. For purposes of constitutional analysis, there are three types of fora. There is a public forum, a non-public forum, and a limited public forum: one is open, one is closed, and the other is somewhere in between. A public forum is a place devoted to public use for expressive activity, such as streets and parks. A non-public forum is public property that is not open to the public for expressive activity, such as offices, secured areas, and the like. A limited open forum is between these two extremes. The significance of the different fora is that limitations placed on speech in each forum are scrutinized differently by the courts. For instance, a town's suppression of speech in a town park will be scrutinized closely because parks have traditionally been places where any member of the public may come and speak to anyone on most any topic. At the opposite end of the scale, the courts would not closely scrutinize limitations on public speech in city office space because employee office space is usually reserved for business purposes, and the free speech activities by public users would generally be inconsistent with day to day business activities. Community meeting rooms, and City Council chambers, generally are considered as limited public tora.