NORTHAMPTON — The City Council will convene in a special meeting Thursday to discuss steps to address its rules regarding public comment after last week’s meeting was disrupted by numerous racist and antisemitic remarks made over Zoom.

What had been planned to be a routine council meeting on Nov. 2 to discuss the city’s first-quarter financial report, establish a tax classification for 2024 and discuss a resolution in support of the city’s Main Street redesign was quickly derailed during the meeting’s public comments section. That’s when people over Zoom using aliases and cameras turned off espoused hate speech during their allotted two minutes.

The vile nature of the comments reached such an extent that council members had to take a 10-minute break to recuperate from what they were listening to, before the public comment session was ultimately suspended by council President Jim Nash.

“It was evident that it was organized,” Nash said in an interview. “We’ve had Zoom bombings in the past, but they were more juvenile and disruptive within the meeting. The queuing up of adults at public comment was something else.”

A similar incident occurred in Northampton at a Board of Health meeting in December 2021, when the board faced numerous antisemitic remarks amid a climate of conspiracy theories about vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. That instance caused the City Council to pass a resolution condemning antisemitism.

Nash said he had been in phone conversations with Alan Seewald, the city’s attorney, ahead of Thursday’s meeting discussing ways to refine the city’s rules regarding public comment to prevent hate speech while still allowing members of the public to otherwise express themselves freely either online or in person.

According to current City Council rules governing public comment periods, members of the public may address the council and all council committees on any matter for two minutes, with councilors not allowed to respond to any comment; and both public and remote participation is permitted for giving public comment.

Massachusetts Open Meeting Law does not require that public bodies, such as the City Council, allow for public comment, although it does “encourage public bodies to allow for as much public participation as time and circumstances permit,” according to the state attorney general’s website. Chairs of public bodies are also given discretion on the logistics of public comment, such as the time limit of comments and the point in the meeting when public comments are taken.

Once a common nuisance in the early stages of the pandemic, when Zoom participation was a new thing for public bodies, Zoom-bombing disruptions appear to have returned to public meetings across the country, including municipalities in California, Maine and Vermont. Some of these municipalities have taken steps to limit hybrid participation to combat such instances.

Nash said there was no guarantee that the council would be able to implement any new rules as a result of Thursday’s meeting, but that the council was certainly determined to give it a try, while still respecting the public’s right to free expression.

“All of the council is energized to come up with ideas,” Nash said. “As council president, I want to maintain that open space for the public to share their thoughts.”

The meeting will be held in person on Thursday at 4:30 p.m. in City Council chambers. As it is a special meeting, public comment will not be taken during the meeting.

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.