Santa Clarita, CA — The Santa Clarita City Council recessed its Tuesday meeting for approximately ten minutes after residents attending a public comment period on the city’s Flock Safety license-plate reader cameras committed the procedural offense of applauding, a development Mayor Laurene Weste characterized as incompatible with the functioning of democracy.

“We are really happy that you’re here,” Weste told the assembled residents before pausing the meeting. “We really want to hear you.” The council then stopped hearing them for ten minutes.

The public comment period had drawn a significant number of residents raising concerns about the city’s Flock ALPR camera contract — including surveillance overreach, data retention practices, inaccurate matches, and the absence of any independent city review of the program’s results — concerns they expressed sequentially, per the rules, within their allotted time, while periodically applauding one another between speakers, which is the thing that caused the timeout.

Councilmember Marsha McLean, who has served on the council since 2006 and has therefore sat through a significant number of public comment periods, addressed the crowd upon return with the energy of a substitute teacher who has finally had enough.

“You want us to respect you, you want us to treat you with respect, but you’re not doing that to us,” McLean said, pivoting to a rhetorical framework that redefines applause as disrespect, an interpretation of civic participation that is either novel or deeply revealing, depending on how charitably you are feeling on a Tuesday evening. She added that the council would take “as long as we need” if residents continued to not comply, which is a sentence that contains the words “as long as we need” in the context of a meeting that residents had driven to City Hall to attend.

Following the recess, City Attorney Joseph Montes provided a tutorial on state and municipal standards governing public comment, which the assembled residents — who had organized, registered to speak, driven to City Hall, and waited their turn — presumably found clarifying.

City Manager Ken Striplin reiterated that the city’s role is to fund tools selected by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department rather than to review, access, or evaluate the data those tools generate, a position that answers the question of who is responsible for the cameras while raising a somewhat larger question about who is responsible for anything.

The council did unanimously approve a $640,000 grant program for businesses affected by the Bouquet Canyon Road closure, which passed without incident, possibly because no one applauded.

Weste is running for re-election in November, assuming of course she is unable to call a timeout for ballots.

Jerome Horwitz

Jerome Horwitz is a Santa Clarita native. His family traces their lineage all the way back to the 1960s when his grandparents moved to the area to start a farm in what is now Castaic Lake. Growing turnips proved unfeasible below water, so they got out of farming and started a donut shop specializing in Bear Claws. Jerome enjoys watching paint dry, and lurking in local Facebook groups.