OPINION: A Total Eclipse of the Sun
Key West killed the sunshine this morning, and only two commissioners flinched
They didn’t announce it. They buried it as Item 10 on a 39-item agenda stuffed between a Workday software contract worth $5.3 million and a proclamation for a man named Caffeine Carl, because that’s how you smuggle a coffin past a crowd—you dress the pallbearers as clerks.
And the undertaker wasn’t even in the room. He was on a cruise.
Resolution 26-5698 amended Section 4 of the Commission’s Rules of Procedure, the section that governs Public Comments, and by the time anyone in the chambers understood what had just been voted through, the gavel had already fallen.
And leading the charge, mouth first, was Commissioner Lissette Carey — a lame duck with nothing left to lose and apparently nothing left to hide, judging by how loudly she’s carried not one but two grand jury reports out of the stadium, Bronx-cheering both of them the whole way like a man booed off the mound twice in the same doubleheader.
That’s not incidental color. A commissioner already publicly rebuked by a first grand jury report, and now sitting under the weight of a second, pushing hardest to narrow what the public can say to the body that just heard about her twice—that’s not governance, that’s a man building a second wall after the first one already fell.
That is called ruling.
This is Florida’s Government-in-the-Sunshine Law we’re talking about, the one that exists because the state decided generations ago (four those keeping score) that the public has a right to watch its government think out loud—open meetings, open minutes, open access, no exceptions carved out for convenience.
The law lets a commission adopt “reasonable” time, place, and manner rules to keep order, sure, but reasonable is a word bureaucrats have been bending like a spoon in a Thompson fever dream for as long as sunshine laws have existed. There’s already precedent in this town for how far that bending can go—Key West banned cursing at the podium last summer, dressed up as decorum, and a city attorney memo had to remind everyone that speech restrictions must be narrowly tailored or they violate the First Amendment outright. Narrowly tailored. That’s the phrase that’s supposed to be the leash.
This morning, the leash got longer, and it wrapped around the public instead of the podium—with the loudest hand on it belonging to the commissioner with two grand jury reports at her back and every reason to want that microphone dead.