Dominic Anthony Walsh/Houston Public Media
An overflow crowd participated in the first evening public comment session held by the Houston City Council on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025.
Bike lanes, police department policies, street closures and crosswalks — those were among the topics addressed by more than 90 speakers during the Houston City Council’s first-ever evening-time public comment session on Tuesday.
“I think this is a great first start,” said council member Mario Castillo, who spearheaded the push to move the public comment sessions back by four hours. “2 p.m. on a Tuesday is hard for a lot of folks, and we need to hear from Houstonians as to how they think we’re doing, ideas that they want to share with us, feedback. So if we continue to see this kind of engagement, I would absolutely support keeping this going.”
Through the end of 2025, the city council will host one session per month at 5:30 p.m. The remaining evening sessions are Sep. 16, Oct. 28, Nov. 18 and Dec. 16. Castillo hopes the pilot program will become permanent if turnout remains high.
Available data from the city shows the number of public speakers for 20 of the 29 previous meetings this year. Before Tuesday, there were between 14 and 84 speakers at those meetings, with an average of about 45.
Tiffany Valle came to City Hall for the first time from Houston’s East End, where a project to overhaul Telephone Road was recently redesigned to no longer include proposed bike lanes. She told Houston Public Media she’s “really passionate about multimobility here in the city,” but she previously wasn’t able to share that passion with the city council.
“I would have had to take a day off of work, which I don’t really want to do,” Valle said. “I’m too busy for that.”
Before the public comment session kicked off, the city council chambers hit the 198-person capacity. Valle was forced to wait in line — which she said was “great.”
“Obviously it’s popular, and that’s what the people want,” she said.
More than 30 people signed up to speak about what they described as the Houston Police Department’s collaboration with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
Katy Murdza, an organizer with the Immigration Legal Resource Center, said the group was “excited to have it be at night.”
“The evening is a little bit easier,” Murdza said. “I am here as part of my job, working for a nonprofit, but a lot of the community members that we work with aren’t able to come with us when we come during the day.”
The turnout, organized by the Houston Leads Coalition, came after the Houston Chronicle reported HPD called ICE on at least 58 people this year, mostly during traffic stops but also after people called 911 for help. In at least one instance, the paper reported, HPD called ICE on a woman after she reported domestic abuse.
“I hope this is the first of many opportunities for our coalition, the members of many of the organizations that are in our coalition, to be able to speak directly to city council so that they can hear the ways in which their decisions can be meaning the detention, deportation, even life or death of people in the community,” Murdza said.
About a dozen people signed up to speak about street projects, pedestrian safety and their desire for multimodal transportation options. Alex Kalin told Houston Public Media he had long been wanting to speak out against the “ongoing direction that the mayor is pushing for streets, pedestrians, bike lanes, crosswalks, everything along those lines.”
Under Mayor John Whitmire, local officials removed a protected bike lane from Austin Street, scrapped plans for shared-used paths on Montrose Boulevard and Antoine Drive, removed safety features from Houston Avenue and paved over a raised crosswalk on Westheimer Road. Kalin was unable to address those decisions in front of the city council — until Tuesday.
“I work for a seven-person company, so it would have meant, you know, leaving everybody else with all the work that I need to do,” Kalin said. “Could I have made it over here? Absolutely, but I’m not about to leave people out to dry like that.”
Hany Khalil, executive director of the Texas Gulf Coast AFL-CIO, was in attendance with other union leaders to receive a proclamation from council member Abbie Kamin recognizing the labor movement ahead of Labor Day. He praised the monthly shift to evening-time public comment sessions.
“Most workers tend to work 9-to-5 shifts, or construction workers 7-to-3 shifts,” Khalil said. “By holding meetings in the evening, it makes it much easier for ordinary working people to be able to come out and participate, just observe, or to potentially speak and weigh in on issues before city council. We think it’s great.”