Stepping up to the podium at a city council meeting to make your voice heard — a hallmark of public participation in local democracy — was transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the societal challenges it brought.
As local governments went virtual, the meetings were opened to a wider audience that could participate from the comfort of their homes, often using Zoom. Political divisiveness also seeped into city council chambers, the elections and public comment on issues like the pandemic and racial justice.
Social movements also brought a rapidly diversifying population to the podium, compelling governments to find new ways to accommodate non-English speakers. Many took advantage of this change to make their voices heard.
It was all on display at the Iowa City Council meeting Tuesday night, largely due to a decision the body made in July to stop using the Zoom teleconferencing platform to host meetings. Three citizens arose during every opportunity for public comment to call on the council to begin using Zoom again so that its meetings could be accessible to the city's disabled population.
The three asked councilors to raise their hands to commit to bringing back Zoom, but none complied. Earlier in the evening, the councilors decided to put the issue on their next work session on Jan. 4, after the new City Council is seated.
"I'm glad that you are telling me that you're going to be putting it on the work session for the next year, but this is something that should have been done quite a while ago. So I need to see some more urgency for this," Noah Petersen said.
Petersen, who has said he is neurodivergent, was joined by Dan Kauble and Tara McGovern at the podium and the three each used all three minutes of the allotted time to call out the city for what they view as discrimination against disabled people.
McGovern left halfway through the meeting, but in total the three took up about 90 minutes of the meeting talking about accessibility issues in the city and their concerns about the homeless population.
During items that were not necessarily related to the issue of accessibility, Mayor Bruce Teague attempted to tell the three they were not speaking to the topic at hand. Still, the three continued on, a sign of how passionate some people feel about accessibility to government meetings using the latest technology.
More:Johnson County sheriff requests $240,000 for BearCat armored vehicle as an MRAP alternative
Early in the pandemic, many local governments began using teleconferencing platforms that provided a way for people to participate in meetings from their homes.
While this practice was largely to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus and prevent people from congregating in one space, it also became a more accessible option for many with disabilities or a scheduling conflict.
But as COVID-19 restrictions began to ease this year, not all government bodies kept up the practice.
Many of Iowa's largest cities have stopped providing a virtual option for participation, including the city councils of Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Davenport and Sioux City. Waterloo and many smaller cities in Iowa, like Indianola and Norwalk to the south of Des Moines, still use Zoom.
Johnson County has continued using Zoom to allow for virtual participation at its Board of Supervisors meetings. Iowa City has not.
Sarah Martinez is the executive director of Access 2 Independence, a center for independent living that operates in eastern Iowa and works to empower people with disabilities, further their independence and make communities more accessible.
Martinez said accessibility to government meetings is improving, especially with the barriers broken down by virtual attendance options. Still, she thinks there is always work to be done to accommodate for the full range of physical and mental disabilities people have.
"There is far greater access now that people can get from the comfort of their homes than having to make all the scheduling adjustments in order to get to a physical location and attend the meeting that may also still have accessibility barriers," she said. "These are accommodations that people have been fighting for in the workplace and in our communities for a long time."
Opinion:Johnson County government isn't 'public' without better transcripts of meetings
Martinez said she is concerned that Iowa City and others are ending their use of Zoom despite the COVID-19 pandemic still continuing. She said the pandemic showed that, when pushed, governments can make things happen no matter the labor or cost.
Rachel Kilburg, an Iowa City assistant city manager and the city's ADA coordinator, said under the Americans with Disabilities Act, requests for accommodations to attend are reviewed on a case-by-case basis and involve an interactive process with the requestor.
She said in most cases, the ADA doesn’t dictate what accommodations must be provided and the law doesn't even necessarily require the city to provide the exact accommodation requested by a disabled individual if it would result in an undue financial or administrative burden.
"While providing Zoom would certainly make meetings more accessible for many types of people, including some with disabilities, it is possible that on a case-by-case basis, more fitting accommodations could also meet accessibility requirements," she said.
The City Council didn't face much public criticism for ending its use of Zoom in July when meetings initially went back to in-person, but the topic has increasingly come up at recent meetings.
Kauble and Petersen also joined a chorus of speakers at the City Council on Dec. 1 to criticize the city not using Zoom. The two regularly show up to criticize City Council on various issues but began asking for Zoom to be brought back and for the city to provide verbatim transcripts of meetings over the past two months.
"If someone was at home and is disabled and they wanted to comment on the consent agenda, they would be unable to because this council lacks hybrid meetings. A hybrid meeting allows people to call in from Zoom," Kauble said. "These hybrid meetings, as shown by the (Johnson County) Board of Supervisors, are possible."
Kauble said he knows several people who are unable to participate because they can't come to meetings in person.
"That's not democracy. That's not what our government, our country, is built upon," he said.
Beyond using Zoom, public commenters have also expressed frustration with aspects of government they deem inaccessible, like the lack of verbatim transcripts of meetings online. There are also concerns that some government bodies, like the Johnson County Board of Supervisors, hold their meetings during times that many people work, making it impossible for them to speak during public comment sessions.
While many speakers at a Dec. 6 meeting thanked the Board of Supervisors for providing a Zoom option, the board has also come under criticism for not being accessible in these other ways.
Johnson County Supervisor Lisa Green-Douglass said at a Dec. 8 work session that she thinks the county using Zoom is "a feather in our cap," and pointed out how much it benefitted the county when buildings were shut down during the pandemic.
"That accommodates in so many ways," she said. "The benefit both to us as a board, us as an employer and the community we serve, is huge."
More:Johnson County Supervisor Pat Heiden will not seek reelection in 2022
Conversations around accessibility to government in Johnson County and Iowa City also encompass a growing immigrant population.
The Fund Excluded Workers Coalition, which has advocated for pandemic relief money for people left out of previous federal aid, has incidentally made a different impact on government in Johnson County.
Many of the people who helped convince Johnson County and Iowa City to allocate more than $3 million from the American Rescue Plan Act for direct payments to excluded workers were Latinos who showed up at numerous government meetings and spoke through an interpreter.
That exposed an inequity in government meetings as non-English speakers had to adhere to the same limited time placed on all public speakers at the podium. Emily Sinnwell, a cofounder of the Catholic Worker House, has been at almost all of these meetings to help interpret for the excluded workers.
While English speakers could use the full three minutes allotted at Iowa City Council and the Johnson County Board of Supervisors, these excluded workers in reality had less than half that time to speak because of the time needed for interpretation.
In response, the Iowa City Council and the Johnson County Board of Supervisors have started doubling the amount of speaking time for people who need to use an interpreter or those with a disability that impairs their ability to speak. But Johnson County only began this practice on Wednesday.
Johnson County is also working to find ways to provide the interpreters for non-English speakers who wish to address their elected officials.
Jose Burgos, the general manager of Innerlingua, a translation services company based in Cedar Rapids, said his business has been working with Johnson County for months to help provide interpretation and translation services and is in contract discussions with the county.
He said Innerlingua has also worked with Iowa City, Lafayette Fields, Arkansas, and Worcester County, Massachusetts. It is in talks to also work with Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Dona Ana County, New Mexico.
Allison Wells, the grants assistant for the Johnson County Board of Supervisors, said in an email the county needs to do an assessment of departments and offices to determine interpretation and translation needs before it can procure those services from a company. Discussions with Innerlingua thus far have been informational, she said.
Wells said the board allocated $10,000 of its Local Fiscal Recovery Fund portion of the ARPA for language translation and interpretation services for the current fiscal year, and preliminarily allocated $10,000 annually through fiscal year 2026.
Kilburg said Iowa City does not hold a contract with a specific company for interpretation, but can hire an interpreter if it is requested.
Kilburg said time limits and the rules around them are determined by the City Council, whereas Johnson County's rules are determined by Chair Pat Heiden unless another Supervisor makes a motion to alter the rules and the motion is approved.
Burgos said interpreting for a government meeting is different from being in court or in a medical environment, and he's heard of some independent interpreters having issues.
"One of them is the simultaneous interpretation, and the second thing is actually the timing it takes, especially because they only give you five minutes to say what you need to say," he said.
He said interpreters must be careful when doing simultaneous interpretation at government meetings because the subjects being discussed are usually extremely emotional and they need to get the words as accurate as possible.
Burgos said doubling the amount of speaking time, which Johnson County only began making a regular practice on Wednesday, will help make it more equitable, but it is still difficult with the limit in place.
He said it also helps when the company is alerted days ahead of time that an interpreter is needed because they need to prepare. Johnson County asks residents to give 48 hours' notice if they need interpretation or accommodation for a disability.
More:'Fresh ideas': Johnson County poised to elect slate of new faces to Iowa Legislature in 2022
Martinez said scaling back the expansion of virtual accessibility brought on by the pandemic is a mistake, and that if the means are available, then governments should do it no matter the cost.
"There is a fear of going back to the way we were before," she said.
Martinez said Iowa City and Johnson County do a good job of providing other forms of access for people with disabilities, such as meeting transcripts when requested or posting recordings and livestreams of the meetings for people who have difficulty processing information and need to play back the meetings.
Martinez said accommodations are built into her organization's budget so that disabled people do not have to request them.
"When I look at my mission and our vision of the community, I do think that that should be built into budgets. That there is always an (American Sign Language) interpreter; that there is always live-captioning whether it is in person or virtual," she said. "There are people who benefit from that greatly whether they identify as a person with a significant disability or not."
Burgos said governments should also realize they need to adapt to non-English speakers as people from all over the world are moving into the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City corridor.
Iowa City is outpacing the state in both total population growth and population growth among minority groups, especially Latinos.
Burgos said the expansion of language interpretation in Iowa will largely depend upon these demographic changes, something he said he has witnessed since he came to the state in 1992 to attend college.
"When I first came here and came with a Central American scholarship program, everybody used to laugh at us and be scared of us as we spoke Spanish, having not heard the language in their lives," he said. "Now (Spanish) is totally something you hear all the time when you go to Walmart and you go to different places."
Burgos said he sees a strong need for Spanish, ASL, Swahili, Haitian Creole and languages from the Middle East, especially Syria and Afghanistan, as refugees continue to migrate.
Burgos said he thinks governments like Johnson County and even at the federal level are starting to see the need for accommodating for other languages, especially Spanish, despite these languages being present in the country for centuries. But unlike with disabilities, governments are not required to accommodate non-English speakers.
"I'm not saying Johnson County neglected this for many years. I'm saying Johnson County is finally starting to find the needs," he said. "The need is there and they finally realized we need to create something."
More:New plan for Hickory Hill Park gets approval from Planning and Zoning Commission and park-goers
George Shillcock is the Press-Citizen's local government and development reporter covering Iowa City and Johnson County. He can be reached at GShillcock@press-citizen.com and on Twitter @ShillcockGeorge