The Long Beach City Council voted 7-2 on September 2 to squeeze nearly all public comment at its meetings into a single 90-minute block at the start of the agenda — a change city leaders say will save about $150,000 a year. But buried in the city’s own justification for the cut is a detail that matters directly to Long Beach’s Cambodian community: the money being saved comes out of the same budget line that funds Khmer interpretation at City Hall.
What Changed
Under the old rules, residents could sign up to speak on a specific agenda item and address the council when that item actually came up for discussion — sometimes hours into a meeting. Speaking time was scaled to turnout: three minutes per speaker if 10 or fewer people signed up, 90 seconds for 11 to 20, and 60 seconds once the list passed 20.
Under the new rules, nearly everyone who wants to speak — outside of formal public hearings, which keep their own comment periods — has to sign up during one comment window at the very beginning of the meeting, before staff even present the item. Speaking time is capped at 60 to 90 seconds depending on how many people show up.
This is the second time the council has tried to pass this change. A nearly identical proposal was rejected in June after packed council chambers and unanimous public opposition. It came back in September reframed as a budget necessity, and this time it passed — with Councilmembers Cindy Allen and Kristina Duggan voting no, and Councilmember Megan Kerr backing it only on the condition that the chair can add 30 more minutes if speakers are still waiting when the initial window closes. The measure still needs a final approval vote before it takes effect.
Why this involves the Cambodian community
The city’s stated reason for the change traces back to Senate Bill 707, the Brown Act Modernization Act, which took effect July 1 and requires cities like Long Beach to offer live call-in public comment and live interpretation in any language spoken by at least 20% of residents with limited English proficiency. Long Beach rolled out that hybrid Zoom/phone system in July.
City Clerk Monique De La Garza has said complying with SB 707 will cost the city roughly $487,000 this fiscal year — overtime that covers, among other things, Khmer and Spanish interpreters, plus a call-center team to manage the Zoom line during long meetings. Long Beach is home to the largest Cambodian population in the United States outside Southeast Asia, which is precisely why Khmer interpretation sits alongside Spanish as a standing cost of running a City Council meeting here.
In other words: the $150,000 the council just voted to save is presented as a way to offset the cost of the same language-access requirement that keeps Khmer interpretation available to Cambodian residents who want to address their council members in their own language. The city has not said interpretation itself is at risk — the savings are framed as freeing up money for other priorities like police staffing and library hours amid a $58.2 million citywide budget deficit. But the pairing is worth watching: language access and public-comment time are now explicitly part of the same budget conversation.
The Bigger Picture
This vote didn’t happen in isolation. Long Beach is in the middle of closing a $58.2 million structural deficit for fiscal year 2027, a gap that has already forced proposed cuts across libraries, police, parks and other departments, and led to roughly 180 layoffs citywide. A separate, earlier fight over Monday library hours — including at branches with heavy immigrant and refugee use — was reversed after public pressure, funded instead through higher parking fines and cannabis taxes. The public-comment change suggests the council is still looking for smaller, less visible savings wherever it can find them, even in the mechanics of how residents get to speak.
What to Watch
- The final vote. This was not the last word — the ordinance requires a second, final approval vote, which gives residents another chance to weigh in.
- Whether interpretation funding gets its own scrutiny. Nothing has been proposed yet to cut Khmer or Spanish interpretation itself, but it’s now explicitly tied to the same cost pressures driving other cuts.
- Legal challenges. Government watchdog groups, including the Long Beach Reform Coalition, argue the new structure may violate the Brown Act’s requirement that the public be able to comment on an item “before or during” its consideration — not only beforehand. SB 707 also extended the window to file a legal challenge over Brown Act violations from nine months to twelve, giving critics more time to act.
KhmerTV will follow this story through the final council vote.