By Matthew Hirsch

San Francisco officials yanked a video of a public meeting off the city's Web site, with the consent of the mayor and city attorney, because a few people in the audience made crass and demeaning remarks about a government employee.

And in an April 14 letter to city commissioners, Mayor Gavin Newsom said he's developing procedures for dealing with offensive speech, suggesting in the meantime that commissioners shut down their meetings if people utter similar comments.

The moves alarmed free speech and open-government advocates, including members of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, who say the mayor's policy could turn into official censorship of political debate.

The action comes in response to members of the Residential Builders Association, who said Amy Lee, then assistant director of the Department of Building Inspection, was unfit to lead the DBI because she is a woman and she's pregnant. (Two weeks later, Lee was awarded the top job at the DBI.)

Just about everyone agrees that the RBA members' comments about Lee at the April 4 meeting were offensive. But San Francisco is known for raucous, heated political discourse, and it's impossible to imagine how city officials could weed it all out. (What, for example, would you do about the Taxicab Commission, the closest thing you'll find to an R-rated flick in a public meeting room?)

And there's a larger, more serious point here: If the city tries to set enforceable rules for "offensive" speech, it will be wading into a legal and political mess that will make City Hall into a parody of local government. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has trouble deciding what's offensive speech. How is a deputy city attorney supposed to do it?

The Bay Guardian contacted Peter Scheer, director of the California First Amendment Coalition, who said he was contacted by Newsom's staff about how to provide a harassment-free workplace to employees without stepping on free speech rights. He said it's OK for city commissioners to call a time-out if things get nasty at a public meeting – but only assuming the meeting won't be called off indefinitely.

(That's what Newsom's press spokesperson Peter Ragone told us, but in the letter to city commissioners, Newsom seems to imply something different. He recommends taking "steps to end any meeting that is in clear violation of city non-discrimination policies." See it yourself here.)

The problem is in trying to write rules for civil conduct that don't violate the First Amendment. "I hope they will think long and hard before they ask everybody to adhere to a speech code that is satisfactory to the most sensitive among us," Scheer told us.

After reviewing the comments directed at Lee, members of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force at an April 26 meeting asked the city to restore the video of the building-inspections hearing to the Internet. The task force has also drafted a letter to Newsom, citing its concern with his reaction to the incident.

"Those statements were obnoxious," task force member Sue Cauthen said of the offending remarks, "but it's nothing I haven't heard men say my whole life. I think what was said was reprehensible, but I don't think it was punishable."

The city hasn't destroyed the tape – it's still available at the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services, in the basement of City Hall. So why pull it from the city's Web site? One possibility: The Recorder, a law newspaper, reported April 18 that Lee was considering suing the city for employment discrimination.

Philip Ginsburg, director of the city's Department of Human Resources, told us Lee had asked for the video to be taken down, and he'd complied, agreeing it was the humane thing to do. "In our city we take very seriously the responsibility to protect our employees from harassment," Ginsburg told us.

"This has nothing to do with open government," he added.

Try telling that to David Greene, director of the First Amendment Project, who defines open government as everything that happens at an official public meeting, not just the parts that could air on daytime television.

"Amy Lee is now a fairly high-ranking government official, and derogatory or offensive statements made against her are a matter of public interest," Greene told us. "Not all operations of government are pretty, and people have a right to see that."

E-mail Matthew Hirsch at matthew@sfbg.com.