NORTHAMPTON — A week after a barrage of racist and antisemitic comments made over Zoom at a City Council meeting, councilors are considering limiting public comment at their bimonthly meetings to only items listed on the agenda.

If enacted — the idea is being met with skepticism from some councilors — the move would be a dramatic shift in how the public interacts with the city’s legislative body. Currently, the public is able to speak about any topic, and councilors are not allowed to respond.

In addition to keeping comments to only matters related to that meeting’s agenda, the proposed changes, introduced at a special council meeting Thursday, would require all participants to sign up at least one hour before the meeting, and give a presiding officer (the city council president) the option to reduce a person’s allotted time if their comment is not relevant to the meeting.

The changes were introduced by council Vice President Karen Foster, who said they were modeled after the public comment system used in Cambridge. That city’s website has a sign-up form where people must register before attending council meetings, providing their full name, email, address, phone number, whether they are attending in person or remotely, and what agenda item they will speaking about before the meeting.

“There’s been a coordinated effort to disrupt local meetings, and there are cities and towns that have removed remote public comment,” Foster said. “The goal here is to kind of thread the needle and to allow for public participation of our residents who can’t physically be here.”

The council convened the special meeting after its Nov. 2 meeting, which was derailed by multiple remote attendees, using aliases and with cameras turned off, to flood the meeting with racist and antisemitic remarks. That resulted in councilors calling for a recess and ultimately suspending public comment.

Councilors on Thursday debated how to curb hateful remarks at meetings while still allowing the public to express their viewpoints openly. Alan Seewald, the city’s attorney, provided an overview of how the First Amendment applies to council meetings.

Seewald noted that the council currently does not have any restriction on what people can say during public comment, except for limiting the length of their comments to two minutes, and that hateful speech is often protected under the First Amendment.

“Courts have ruled that just because something is offensive, doesn’t mean it’s not protected by the First Amendment,” he said. “And this concept of group defamation, talking about a group as opposed to talking about an individual person, is really not recognized as an exception to the First Amendment.”

Massachusetts Open Meeting Law, however, does not require that public bodies, such as the city council, allow for public comment (though the state strongly encourages it), and that the council has leeway in determining when public comments take place and for how long, in addition to any other limits they choose.

Seewald cautioned that any attempts to curb hate speech would also likely curb well-intentioned comments on city matters.

“It’s your forum, you created the forum and you can limit the forum,” he said. “But any limitation on the forum to avoid what we saw last Thursday will inevitably sweep with it some of those legitimate uses of public comment, and that’s the balance that this body has to really reach.”

Some council members expressed reservations about changing the city’s rules, wary of rushing into something that could limit the public’s ability to express themselves freely.

“Certainly the words we heard were very upsetting, but we need to consider that balance,” said Ward 5 councilor Alex Jarrett. “There are some people who participate remotely and it’s challenging for them just to do it at all, and in adding additional steps, we are imposing barriers if we do that.”

The city’s two African American councilors, Garrick Perry and Jamila Gore, also showed hesitation over imposing additional limits. Perry, the Ward 4 councilor, said any new limits played into the hands of last week’s disruptors.

“There’s two parts of what they were doing. One is to put out hate speech, but the other is to disrupt our democracy,” Perry said. “I’m very uncomfortable having people only talk about stuff on the agenda.”

Gore said she didn’t want to put limits on the free exchange of ideas between the public and the city council.

“To be able to make a comment, I think it’s a really treasured thing that we have in this town,” Gore said. “I wouldn’t want to put any more barriers on the public comment, besides the two minutes we already have.”

Despite reservations, the council voted unanimously to send the proposed rule change to the Committee on Legislative Matters, which will further review and refine the proposed rule change before sending it back to the council for a final vote.