Council cites hate speech to censor hearing on rent-controlled housing

Antisemites allegedly crashed a Durango City Council’s Zoom meeting for a proposed housing development by taking advantage of the public comment period to spew some nastiness and hate.

City Council zapped all the comments from the recording, so it’s not clear what was said or whether it was in any way related to the Israel/Palestinian war, or the property rezoning for 300 rent-controlled manufactured homes.

The Durango Herald reports council and audience members were “offended and sickened by the hate speech.”

But we’ll never know if the comments were really hate speech, or in some way relevant to the zoning topic because even the Durango Herald declined to characterize the stricken comments beyond being hateful, antisemitic, and sexually disparaging.

In the end, the city council voted to approve the rezoning of hundreds of manufactured homes. But they also voted to censor the hate speech from the recording of what appears to be a controversial project.

If folks are just yelling profanities and acting crazy, we get it. But to declare public hearing comments hate speech and then strike it from the record without any accounting of the context of the comments?

Cringe.

Gilda Yazzie was the lone council member who disagreed with censoring those portions of the meeting, and noted the importance of keeping a record of public forums, even if it’s only to show how it got out of control.

“It was real offensive to me to hear that stuff,” she added, saying, “it’s offensive to me when even some of our local people here who say stuff like, ‘The people that we want in our community.’ When they testify that kind of language to me, it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh. Should I duck?’”

It doesn’t sound like the meeting was trolled by Palestinian protestors who mistook Durango Colorado as their homeland.

It sounds like some callers were bad-mouthing the kind of tenants who would live in the rent-controlled community.