Mayor orders citizen forcibly removed from Council meeting
Questions arise as to how Council defines 'acceptable' public comment
CITY HALL—There was a sizable crowd, but it was silent. No one in attendance at Tuesday night's Council meeting could be seen to move nor speak as a citizen making public comments at the podium was hauled out of the Council chambers under threat of arrest at Tuesday night's first regularly scheduled Council meeting of November.
When the meeting adjourned, citizens milled about outside the City Annex, recapping what had just happened. One asked aloud if it had been an activist's stunt to bait the mayor. Another opined there is enough political force and brutality in the nation right now.
'Failure to follow instructions'
The meeting agenda might easily have led one to believe the evening would be joyful. Two citizens were in the audience, including a teenager, there to receive Berea Human Rights Commission's two humanitarian awards. Instead there was heaviness as Lisa Abbott, co-founder of the local citizens action group, We Show Up, was forcibly removed at the mayor's behest after she refused to stand down on her comments to Council regarding the impact on Bereans of the Trump administration's denial of their federal food assistance and other federal actions.
It was the first time in recent memory a citizen had been treated with police force during a City Council meeting.
Acting as Council's sergeant at arms during the meeting, Berea Chief of Police Jason Hays stepped up to Abbott at the podium and asked her to please come with him. She did not. At the mayor's signal, Hays grabbed Abbott around her arms and attempted to walk her out of the chambers, ultimately lifting her off her feet slightly.
As Hays was removing Abbott from the room, she called back to the public, "Can you all help me stay, please? I'd love to hear from you if you'd like me to stay." No one in the room responded to Abbott's plea. Instead, she continued to read from her prepared remarks while being dragged through the door as the mayor called for the camera to be cut.
The incident was recorded in the live stream of the meeting, but while there is audio of Abbott being removed, there is no video footage of the incident.
Fraley called a recess once Abbott had been removed. No one in Council nor in the public seats made a sound as Fraley exited the chambers through the door behind Council.
'I was abiding by the rules'
Once the meeting was back in session, the mayor told the hushed room that Abbott's comments were not about City business but were to do with national policy decisions the Council could do nothing about, and that the public comment section of the meeting is for City business only.
Soon after being tossed, Abbott posted a copy to Facebook of what she claimed she'd planned on saying in her address to Council. The post ends with direct questions to Council about what they plan to do to help locals who find themselves hungry and uninsured, the result, she said, of the current administration's cuts to federal assistance programs.
In a text, Abbott told The Edge her concerns are, "extremely local. It's my neighbor. My friends. My kids' classmates. These cuts don't get more local." She was shut down, she said, before she could ask Council what could be done.
"[Fraley] read the rules. I was abiding by them," Abbott said in her text. "He decided to shut it down anyway."
Fraley meanwhile, claimed, "It was a failure to follow the instructions of the Chair. She violated that," he told The Edge after the meeting. In Council meetings, the Chair is the mayor. "She was asked to stop, and she wouldn't stop, and so she was removed. In the Council chambers, we will have order," Fraley said in the interview.
'Threatened with arrest'
In her Facebook post, Abbott claimed she was threatened with arrest.
"I was trying to tell her several times that I didn't want to take her to jail and for her to listen to the mayor, and to just please come with me," Hays told The Edge after the meeting. "She kept talking and talking, and talking over me and talking over Bruce, and then he was trying to talk over her. So, I'm not sure how much she heard me. Then the mayor looked at me and he's signaling for me to take her out of the room, so I began to pull her out of the room," Hays said.
Once outside of the chambers, Hays claimed Abbott quit resisting being removed from the meeting, and became still. "She said she knew I was just doing my job. I said, yes, I was."
Hays said he asked Abbott to leave, and not return to the building that evening, or else he would have to arrest her.
Mayor warned before meeting
After the meeting, The Edge learned that Abbott had shared with Fraley ahead of time what she had planned to speak about. In turn, Fraley alerted Shawn Sandlin, the City's administrator, and Hays, that Abbott planned on being disruptive. In a text, The Edge asked Abbott whether this was so.
"[Fraley] told me that I would not be allowed to speak about healthcare and food stamps," Abbott wrote in her reply. "I said okay. In that case, I will be disruptive. But then he called me to the podium after reading the rules. I abided by those rules."
In a separate text, Abbott told The Edge that had Fraley not called her to the podium, she would have disrupted the meeting by speaking up from her seat in the audience.
In the audio, Fraley is heard giving instructions to keep all public comments pertinent to City business, and telling the audience the first speaker wanted to address healthcare and food stamps. He then calls Abbott to the podium. The Edge was unable to reach Fraley by press time to confirm whether he'd told Abbott prior to the meeting not to discuss these topics, and if so, why he invited her to do so.
City business 'only'
Nearing the end of the meeting, the mayor reiterated his position on the incident. "What I have been charged with, by all of you, is to maintain order in our Council meetings, and we will have professional and respectful comments that will follow the rules," he said.
During Council's comments, Councilmembers Steve Caudill and Katie Startzman took turns unpacking the incident. Caudill said the historical context of public comment in Council meetings is important for citizens to understand.
"Public comment has been something that we've wrestled with several times on this Council," Caudill said. "Because we've had times where public comment is inappropriate, hurtful and attacking. [Abbott] was not attacking us, but you can't pick and choose, and so if the comments are outside of the rules that have been set, then you have to end the public comment."
"This was upsetting today," Startzman said. "I recognize that decorum is important and I recognize what we as a Council set as [the rules of] public comment, but public comment has been fraught in my entire time on Council," she continued. "I just want to say that this is a stressful time. All politics is local and there are so many people in our community who are hurting, and well, we can't deal with things at the state and federal levels, because we have a very limited job...I don't know what the comments were that [Abbott] was about to say, but I do emphasize that...we shouldn't be blind, intentionally blind, to what is going on in our community, and that people are being impacted."
Councilmember Steve Davis commented that if citizens encounter a person who is hungry, then the answer is to feed them. "I mean, forget about the rest of it," he said. "That's just humanity. Let's don't forget that...people are hurting, for whatever reason. Let's remember to reach out to the neighbor who needs to be fed."
The other Councilmembers, except Councilmember John Payne, commented on the need to stick to the rules or commended Fraley for his ability to keep order in the chambers. Payne urged residents to support the local food bank that is having its fundraiser right now with all funds being matched. Councilmember Cora Jane Wilson was absent from the meeting.
Public comment outside
Multiple people standing in the parking lot after the meeting told The Edge they could see both sides to the incident.
Others said they'd heard others comment about non-City related items in the past. Earlier this year, The Edge covered a meeting where a citizen used public comment to express similar fears as Abbott's, that locals would be adversely impacted by federal cuts. That citizen was not removed from the room.
During a discussion about whether Abbott had warned the mayor, another Berean who'd attended the meeting, but who asked not to be identified by name for fear of reprisals at work, told The Edge she was disappointed the mayor "took the bait" when provoked by Abbott. "The mayor was the one who ended up being disruptive," the person said. "And it was intimidating to watch [Abbott] being silenced with force in a public forum like that."
11/5/2025: This story has been updated to include mention of the novelty of the mayor's order.
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