Boulder’s City Council will hold its next few meetings virtually in response to protests and disruptions at recent in-person meetings.

On Thursday night, council members voted 7-2 to move the Jan. 16 and Feb. 6 meetings online. A Jan. 23 study session was already scheduled to be a virtual meeting.

The decision to move the meetings to virtual comes as ferocious community debate and protest over the war in Gaza has continued to roil the council chambers. There is a provision in city code that allows council members to exclude or limit members of the public from attending meetings in person when “a public health or safety concern exists.”

Although protesters have been a near-constant presence during open comment at council meetings for more than a year, tensions and anger over the war flared up at the Dec. 19 council meeting, forcing the council into a nearly 15-minute recess. After that meeting, some council and community members expressed feeling unsafe.

Councilmember Matthew Benjamin and Mayor Pro Tem Lauren Folkerts voted against holding the meetings virtually. Councilmember Taishya Adams said she had intended to vote no, as well, but mistakenly voted yes.“Having a handful of people run us out of our own building, I think, sends a really bad message to our community,” Benjamin said at the meeting, adding that going online would be a choice to “abdicate our leadership and responsibility.”

Adams said she wanted to honor community members’ right to protest and allow people to speak to the council in-person.

“I believe we need to stand firm for our community members to be able to talk to us to our face, and to … figure out mechanisms to be able to do that,” she said.

But other council members said that temporarily moving meetings online would buy the council time to decide how to handle disruptive people and behaviors at meetings going forward.

“(I) would not characterize this as being run off, but instead a brief pause while we reassess our responses to some of the disruptions that we’ve seen in council chambers to make sure that we can keep all attendees of our meetings safe,” said Mayor Aaron Brockett.

There will also still be open comment periods during the virtual Jan. 16 and Feb. 6 meetings, Brockett told the Daily Camera.

The Dec. 19 council meeting was far from the only meeting that’s been disrupted by protesters, but it was one of the more dramatic recent examples. Shouting, chanting and confrontations among audience members erupted after Boulder resident Evan Ravitz spoke during open comment. He became angry and cursed at council members, which appeared to also set off protesters and others in the audience.

Ravitz later told the Daily Camera that he became angry in part because people in the audience repeatedly interrupted him and council members did not give him enough time to finish his speech. A few minutes earlier, he said, he also had a sign that he was holding with his feet while he used his hands to finish writing his speech, but Brockett told him he needed to hold his sign with his hands. Ravitz said he did not believe he had broken any rule.

In response to the commotion, Brockett called a recess, the council retreated to another room and it took nearly 15 minutes to clear the protesters out of the council chambers. They then moved downstairs and continued protesting.