Dear Friend of the First Amendment,
A man is waving a red card at you, and you’re suddenly escorted out. What just happened?
No, you’re not a soccer player who has flagrantly fouled another player. You’re just a concerned community member at a Temecula Valley school board meeting, and the board president, Joseph Komrosky, did not like what you said. Now you’re being escorted out of the meeting by armed sheriff’s deputies.
Komrosky is now well-known throughout Temecula as the school board president who ejects meeting attendees with a flip of the wrist and a flash of a red card for any speech or behavior he deems “disruptive” or threatening.
California law doesn’t allow this. And neither does the U.S. Constitution.
The Ralph M. Brown Act, the state’s open meetings law, permits the presiding board member to remove meeting attendees only if their behavior “actually disrupts, disturbs, impedes, or renders infeasible the orderly conduct of the meeting.” With limited exceptions, the law also requires that the individual is first warned they’re being disruptive and can be removed if they don’t stop.
But at Temecula school board meetings, that’s not how it plays out.
Call a board member a “homophobe”? Red card, ejected.
Say another board member is “probably a Communist”? Ejected.
But when a man actually starts making threatening comments against LGBTQ people? Next speaker.
That was the last straw for Julie Geary, a school teacher and Temecula resident for more than 25 years. She saw the double standard in Komrosky’s meeting conduct rules and called him out.
You guessed it: Red card, ejected.
Today, FAC and the ACLU of Southern California filed a lawsuit on behalf of Geary and a second Temecula resident, Upneet Dhaliwal, against Komrosky and the Temecula Valley Unified School District for violating their rights under the First Amendment and California law. Both Geary and Dhaliwal had been removed from school board meetings without causing actual disruption or first being warned.
This case isn’t just about one heavy-handed (or card-waving) elected official. Public meetings are at the heart of civic engagement, and conduct like Komrosky’s chills speech and public participation, striking at the heart of our democracy. We’re proud to fight for the rights of engaged community members like our clients.
Thank you for your interest in our work.
David Snyder, Executive Director
First Amendment Coalition
