BILLINGS A Billings activist group is opposing a two-hour time limit on City Council meetings, an idea that the council is trying out until the end of the year.City council members decided during Monday nights meeting to impleme nt the two-hour limit on upcoming work session meetings. All agenda items and public comment that the evening meetings do not cover will get pushed to the next day at noon.Watch the report: Attack on free speech: Billings activist group opposes city council meeting time limitLain Dorsey, a member of Billings Alliance for Immigrant Rights (BAIR), attended the meeting and spoke against the idea.You cannot roll over the meetings to noon the next day. Do you understand that most people are at work? said Dorsey during the meeting.MTN spoke with the activist, who worries public comment on non-agenda items, which often falls at the end of meetings, will get cut short.We saw that as an attack on free speech because there's a lot of working people who can't be there during the middle of the day, like myself, said Dorsey. Billings PD Officers were coming up behind us, telling us we need to sit down when we got out of line or were out of order. The meeting went into recess twice and ran for two hours and 20 minutes.We had a set of disruptors that were not necessarily there to comment on the business at hand but were more there to demonstrate and obstruct our ability to do our work, said council member Scott Aspenlieder, referring to BAIR.Its this length of meetings that Aspenlieder, who proposed the time limits, is trying to reduce.Seventy-five percent of work session meetings exceed two hours, said Aspenlieder. I firmly believe that we see a lack of participation in meetings because nobody wants to sit there to wait till their public comment until 9 or 9:30 at night. He told MTN the council plans to try out the time limit and decide in January whether to keep it permanently.The goal here is to kind of test run it voluntarily, he said.BAIR plans to come back to city council meetings in January to speak against setting permanent time limits.We will be back to oppose that again, said Dorsey. Everybody should have access to these meetings.BAIR last attended a city council meeting in August to press the city to keep ICE out of Billings and establish a sanctuary city.Related: ICE out: Billings group presses city leaders for actionIt's necessary for us to continue to bring that up until City Council actually takes meaningful action and works to protect immigrants, said Dorsey. ...read more read less