To an outsider, the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against Freeborn County may appear clear cut. The county has a rule that limits what people can say when addressing the board during its meetings and gives the commissioners’ chairman power to ban anybody who violates it. One resident of Albert Lea has been banned from speaking multiple times and a local group that brought the case to the MCLU doesn’t want to see anybody else suffer the same fate.

But there’s a lot more going on here.

The Freeborn County residents named as the plaintiffs claim that this is not about Roger Bok, the banned speaker who was recently reinstated. But this is and always has been about Bok. He is the only one who has ever been affected by the rule; in fact he was probably the main reason it was adopted. In contrast, in the last year alone, dozens of residents, often angry and hostile, have addressed the board over a variety of contentious issues without &uot;Rule 19&uot; being applied.

The plaintiffs also seem to have an ax to grind with County Administrator Ron Gabrielsen and most of the commissioners. Ever since courthouse expansion was approved last year, they have been constantly critical of the current county establishment. They want regime change, and this lawsuit could easily be construed as an attempt to nail the commissioners and administrator however possible in order to further that goal. Of course, this has no bearing on the legal questions raised by the suit, but if their action is indeed politically motivated, they lose some of their credibility in our eyes.

There are also questions on the county’s side. Gabrielsen seems to favor fighting this lawsuit tooth and nail. That may or may not be a defensible course of action, but it’s easy to believe that it is largely driven by personal ill feelings toward the plaintiffs. The county should defend itself to a reasonable degree, but must be careful not to fight change simply because it doesn’t want to admit defeat.

None of that will matter in court. So regardless of the motives on either side, the lawsuit requires an objective examination of the rule in question. And if you take the rule at face value and throw out any history of its use involving Bok, it appears to go too far.

By banning residents from speaking on a topic more than twice in a year or making &uot;personal, impertinent, offensive, slanderous, quarrelsome, challenging, profane, abusive or boisterous remarks tending to reasonably alarm, arouse anger or cause resentment in others,&uot; the board was clearly trying to give itself the power to keep meetings running smoothly, which is an innocent enough goal. But the rules have the potential for abuse and some of them seem unnecessary. The long list of adjectives describing banned speech could be used to bar just about anybody the chairman wants. Who decides what is &uot;offensive,&uot; and what in particular is wrong with a resident &uot;challenging&uot; elected representatives? What if somebody has a legitimate reason for bringing up a topic more than twice? It can be argued that the board will make exceptions with good cause, but giving them the power to decide when to apply the rule leaves open the possibility of discrimination.

Except in the case of one notorious resident, the rule has not been used. But the problem is that it could be, and the power to shut out the public is not a power any elected officials need to have. Good intentions aside, the possibility for abuse exists and that is not acceptable.

For both sides, this lawsuit is muddied by the circumstances. But the county should see past that and make revisions to Rule 19. Instead of wasting a lot of time and money on this lawsuit, the county should take seek a compromise that pleases the MCLU and the plaintiffs while giving the board reasonable power to run its own meetings.