Berkeley has made endurance a qualification for participating in government.
Council meetings routinely stretch late into the night as elected officials hear hours of repetitive testimony, sometimes on matters over which the City has little or no authority. A 2025 special meeting on Gaza lasted 6 hours and 44 minutes and heard 197 speakers.
Council and staff attention is a finite public resource. Every hour of Council and staff attention devoted to a Category 3 issue is an hour unavailable for Berkeley’s Category 1 responsibilities. The cost is larger than the time visible on the dais: agenda preparation, legal review, staff work, security, constituent correspondence, and follow-up all consume the same limited attention budget that Category 1 responsibilities depend on.
The cost is also more than wasted time. Unpredictable marathon meetings filter both who serves and who gets heard. A parent, physician, engineer, caregiver, shift worker, or small-business owner may not be able to surrender an entire evening waiting for an item to be called. The same burden discourages capable people from running for Council in the first place. Organized activists and political professionals are much better positioned to endure the process.
It does not have to work this way. California law permits reasonable limits on public-comment time. Committee hearings can absorb testimony before matters reach the full Council. Agendas can be disciplined and meetings given predictable endpoints.
Public participation should inform decisions, not become an endurance test for making them.
For what Berkeley could do instead, see the companion page, Make Public Comment Inform the Decision.