The Sarasota City Commission will decide on Monday, July 1, whether to approve additional money for Commissioner Kyle Battie’s legal fees, which already exceed the $15,000 that was originally approved.

The city commission should decline the request for more money.

Battie was sued for defamation by Kelly Franklin, a private citizen, after he brandished a clearly fabricated paper printout of a racist image from a fake Facebook page with her name prominently displayed. Battie’s declaration about Franklin was made during a January city commission meeting; he had been given the image in question by the owner of the Corona Cigar Co. after it was allegedly delivered to Corona’s business address.

Battie brought the issue up as an agenda item that he’d demanded be added at the last minute, and there was no backup material attached. The commissioners were not provided with the offending image until almost an hour into the meeting.

During the ensuing months, Battie’s attorney filed a motion claiming that his client could not be sued for defamation because he had “absolute privilege from liability.” On June 12, Circuit Court Judge Stephen M. Walker ruled in favor of Battie; in doing so, the judge relied on a 1983 District Court case which stated that words “spoken or written by public servants in judicial and legislative activities are protected by absolute privilege from liability for defamation. However false or malicious or badly motivated the accusation may be, no action will lie therefor in this State.”

It’s important to understand that the issue of whether Franklin was defamed has not actually been heard by the court – though the evidence appears to be overwhelmingly in her favor. However, the outrageous total immunity afforded public officials in Florida has barred the case from moving forward in its present form.

As the courts have stated, elected officials are fully protected from legal action even when their motives are “bad or malicious.”  But in this case there is proof from various public records requests that Battie knew a month before his public statements that the offensive image never appeared on Franklin’s Facebook page. Yet Battie waited a full month before placing this fabricated issue on the city commission’s agenda and unleashing a claim of racism against Franklin – and, by association, against CityPAC, a city watchdog group that has in past provided critiques of decisions made by the commission.

To this day it is not publicly known where the falsified printout of a racist image came from, and no official action has been taken to inquire into it. According to City Attorney Robert Fournier, the city commission does not have the power to investigate one of its own under the city charter.

So where does this leave us?

It leaves us, the citizens of Sarasota, being forced to pay the legal expenses of a city commissioner who refused Franklin’s early offer to not pursue legal action if he would simply issue a public apology.

More: ‘Sorry’ is the hardest word to say. But Commissioner Kyle Battie should say it anyway.

It is now clear that our elected officials are free to publicly broadcast false and reputation-damaging information about us – just as long as they do so during the course of city business. And while narrowing the immunity through legislation is possible, it is unlikely given that the Florida Legislature has exempted itself from the Sunshine Law –and has also taken steps to make it nearly impossible to issue ethics complaints against legislators.

As of now, other than voting them out, the only redress against elected officials who knowingly defame is to let them pay their own way through the legal morass that follows. When ethics and decency fail to make public officials consider their words, legal costs might do the trick.

Eileen Walsh Normile is a former Sarasota city commissioner and a member of CityPAC’s steering committee. She previously served as an assistant prosecutor in the Union County Prosecutor’s Office in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota’s citizens shouldn’t be paying Kyle Battie’s legal fees