The Sarasota City Commission ushered in the New Year facing complaints from residents who said the mayor violated citizens’ First Amendment rights during its first meeting of 2026.
Mayor Debbie Trice twice interrupted speakers during the public input portion of the Commission’s Jan. 5 meeting, warning them that they could not make “personal attacks” or refer to individual commissioners by name and insisting they were required to address the commission only as a body. In another exchange, she threatened to remove a speaker after he continued talking past his time limit.
Trice, who began her one-year term as mayor in November, defended her actions in an interview with Suncoast Searchlight, saying she was trying to enforce proper decorum and exercise her own judgment about what is appropriate in public meetings.
But First Amendment experts said that her approach could chill public participation and leave Sarasota vulnerable to costly lawsuits.
“It’s bullshit and unconstitutional,” said Bobby Block, executive director of Florida’s First Amendment Foundation, after Searchlight shared Trice’s rationale for cutting off speakers.
The residents had been raising concerns about neighborhood noise, and in doing so, two of them made comments about specific commissioners, including one who said District 1 Commissioner Kyle Battie was not living up to the legacy of the late District 1 Commissioner and former Sarasota Mayor Rev. Jerome Dupree.
Battie interrupted the speaker and asked if the mayor was going “to allow her to attack me.” Trice agreed and immediately said, “No more attacks of anybody.”
Trice’s actions prompted one of the speakers to complain to the city attorney after the meeting and at least two observers to email commissioners the next day, arguing that residents had been silenced for legitimate criticism and that the mayor was violating the First Amendment, as well as Robert’s Rules of Order — the parliamentary guide used by most government bodies to run meetings.
“Who’s the president today? Can I say what the president doesn’t want to hear versus what the previous president was happy to hear?” Trice said. “Same thing with the governor. There are some things that we are no longer allowed to say. Teachers are no longer allowed to say certain things in the classroom. So, you know, elections have consequences. All I’m saying is, whoever is at the table has been entrusted with using their judgment.”
Courts have determined that allowing or barring speech based on a mayor’s personal interpretation rather than on clear and objective rules violates the First Amendment because citizens’ rights do not fluctuate depending on who occupies the office.
What happened inside City Hall
Newtown resident Ronnique Hawkins was among the first to speak. Hawkins, who lives just off the Martin Luther King Jr. business corridor, has been lodging complaints with the city for over eight years about excessive noise in the neighborhood after 11 p.m. without any discernible response.
“I’m just so angry and exhausted that I’m still talking about this in 2026, and there’s been no action,” she said in an interview with Suncoast Searchlight this week.
Hoping to push the issue again in the new year, Hawkins went to the 10 a.m. meeting with her wheelchair-bound neighbor Howard Butts and a friend, national motivational speaker and Manatee County Sheriff community liaison Victor Woods.
Woods kicked them off, explaining the situation and asking for the commissioners’ help.
“What’s going on in Newtown is completely unacceptable,” he said. “I’m from Lakewood Ranch. I can’t do that in my neighborhood…Turn the music down. The reason I’m here is for my friend, Ronnique. She’s got cancer. She calls me on the phone every weekend and says, ‘I can’t sleep after chemotherapy.”
When Woods’ allotted three minutes concluded and the buzzer sounded, Trice interrupted and thanked him for his statement. When he attempted to conclude his remarks, she interrupted again, telling him, “You need to stop now. We’ll ask you to leave if you don’t.”
Then it was Hawkins’ turn. She pleaded her case and showed the commissioners videos of loud parties disturbing Newtown neighbors late into the night. But when she began saying Battie didn’t live up to the legacy of his late predecessor in addressing the issues of his district, Trice shut her down at Battie’s urging.
During the afternoon portion of the meeting, another resident, Jim Lampl, addressed his own concerns related to noise, as well as taxation, for downtown residents. When Lampl quoted a commissioner’s past statement that loud noise was “the price they pay for living in the downtown urban core,” Trice interrupted.
“Um, are we, are you, sort of — it looked like you are doing a personal attack,” Trice told him.
Lampl said he was just repeating something that a current elected commissioner had said in City Hall’s chambers and that he was not mentioning that official by name.
Trice was unmoved: “But you are singling out a commissioner rather than a commission.”
Lampl relented and did not finish that portion of his prepared remarks.
Trice had raised no objection earlier when Woods directly addressed Battie multiple times in his remarks as “Kyle, my brother.”
In an interview with Suncoast Searchlight days after the meeting, Trice had difficulty remembering why she cut off Hawkins, first saying it was because she had played videos that included loud music laced with obscenities. When reminded that she cut Hawkins off only after Battie protested, she changed her answer: “I wasn’t thinking about stating the reason. I was just shutting it down.”
Regarding stopping Lampl, Trice said she “could see the direction he was going… so I headed him off.”
She said she had no problem with a citizen reciting something a commissioner had said at a past meeting, but that Lampl’s use of the personal pronoun “he” triggered her to jump to action.
“We only have one commissioner who is a ‘he,’” she said. “So it was directly referencing an individual as opposed to the commission as a body. Because you’re supposed to address the commission as a body.”
Lampl said he called the city attorney the following morning, regretting that he hadn’t demanded an interpretation at the dais for shutting him down and requesting a written determination on what is and is not allowed speech before the commission.
Additionally, city residents Virginia Hoffman and Joyce Cloutier sent emails to commissioners and city staff to complain about “subjective perceptions” that silenced citizens.
“It pissed me off,” Hoffman later told Suncoast Searchlight. “There’s obviously a subjective aspect to this. They need clarity.”
Moms for Liberty vs. Brevard Public Schools
For Block, what unfolded in Sarasota was not an isolated dispute over meeting rules but part of a broader pattern he said is playing out across the country.
Animated by what he sees at all levels of government in 2026 as “concerted efforts to avoid accountability that begin with controlling speech,” Block warned that Sarasota is “opening itself up to state and federal lawsuits. They’ll use taxpayer dollars to pay for it, and they will lose.”
He referenced a 2024 federal court decision where the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled in favor of Moms for Liberty’s Brevard County, Florida chapter and three concerned parents in their lawsuit against Brevard Public Schools.
The court determined that multiple policies restricting speech at school board meetings violated the First Amendment rights of parents and community members. The case successfully challenged prohibitions on “abusive” and “personally directed” speech at public meetings, as well as the district’s unusually restrictive application of its ban on “obscene” speech.
The Brevard School District was forced to pay $568,000 to bring the suit to a close.
The ruling and payout illustrate the legal and financial risks governmental bodies face when they improperly restrict public comment.
When interviewed by Suncoast Searchlight about the situation, Commissioners Liz Alpert and Katherine Kelly Ohlrich deferred to Trice.
“It’s Debbie’s call. I’m not going to second-guess her,” Alpert said.
Ohlrich, meanwhile, downplayed the concerns, attributing the situation to having “a new mayor who is learning how to preside over a meeting.”
“We all are responsible to ensure we follow the law. We do the best we can, in every way.”
The current mayor and commission had been trained on parliamentary procedure for municipal government in Florida during a workshop they hosted in October. During the training, Clearwater-based expert Randy Mora encouraged the commission and charter officials to have a very open tolerance for citizen input.
“When somebody says, ‘I’m here in public comment and wish to do an interpretive dance,’ let them have their three minutes and do their dance,” Mora told them. “One of our vice presidents once famously said, ‘The right to be heard is not the same as the right to be taken seriously.’”
Block pointed out that the 2025 Government in the Sunshine Manual limits decorum rules to four areas, none of which include prohibiting addressing individuals or personal attacks.
When asked about citizen concerns and Block’s observations, Sarasota City Attorney Joe Polzak, who brought Mora to present to the Commission, acknowledged the issue.
“I have already had a conversation with Jim Lampl and I have tasked my team to look at this,” he said. “I’d like to take a fresh look at our rules and then work with the City Commission on any updates that are needed.”
Like Block, Lampl said he believes this to be a serious issue.
“You encourage citizen participation,” he said, “but then stifle us when we come to the chambers.”
This story was originally published by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom delivering investigative journalism to Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
Editor's note: Suncoast Searchlight says it does not use generative AI in its stories. If you have questions about their policies or content, contact Executive Editor-In-Chief Emily Le Coz at emily@suncoastsearchlight.org.
