Langley Township council will ask a judge to ban a man who has been removed from public meetings by police twice in the last month.
After the May 16 incident, the Township has applied to restrict access by the man to any Township facility.
If the ban is approved, he will be able to access Township facilities only through a designated staff member.
The man was escorted out of the most recent meeting again on Monday night.
On May 30, he stood up and began to speak over Mayor Jack Froese while Froese was introducing a public hearing.
The man repeatedly called “Point of order” and wanted to make a “formal complaint.”
Froese asked him to stop interrupting. After a minute or more, the mayor called for the RCMP to escort the man out of the council chambers.
An officer in plainclothes, who had been sitting near the man, and a uniformed officer who had been at the back of the chambers, escorted the man out. He was not cuffed inside the chambers, as he was during his last removal.
The man did not fight back during either incident.
The man was not arrested or charged, only taken out of the municipal building and released.
Following the May 30 incident, a man in the audience shouted that the man who had been removed “wasn’t even allowed to speak.”
Froese warned the second man to also observe decorum in the public hearing.
“I’m not afraid of you,” the man said.
“No one’s afraid of me,” Froese replied.
The public hearing resumed, but there were no actual speakers on the rezoning at issue, which was a cluster of townhouses and a six-storey condo development at the corner of 72nd Avenue and 208th Street.
On May 16th, the man interrupted another public hearing in the same way, and was cuffed and dragged from the council chambers by an RCMP officer.
Froese said after that incident that the RCMP had been sending officers to the meetings for about a year in case of disruptions.
The man in both incidents has a long history of speaking at public meetings, but he had seldom previously interrupted in this way.
He does not usually object to specific aspects of any given development. He usually gives the same prepared speech, regardless of what the topic of the public hearing is.
In the last two incidents, he was objecting to the scheduling of public hearings, claiming it was against council’s own policy.