CAMBRIDGE — Allan Dettweiler, who coiled a fake snake around his neck at a city council meeting last month, is now banned from those meetings for a full year.

It's the Preston resident's second ban from council chambers this year, to go along with a three-month sanction for an outburst at a January meeting.

Before a past election, video evidence allegedly showed him dropping "Ditch Donna" cards on chairs in the chambers, urging voters to unseat incumbent councillor Donna Reid. That earned him a one-month stay-away order.

But this ban is the first to involve a mock reptile he calls Sammy.

"I never thought somebody would go snaky over a snake," said Dettweiler, a city resident off-and-on for decades and a more-than-occasional observer at council meetings.

That is, a wooden snake that is two or three feet long.

Dettweiler is forbidden from entering city hall, old town hall or municipal premises to participate in meetings or municipal functions for 12 months, according to a June 26 letter from city clerk Michael Di Lullo.

The letter, which Dettweiler received this week, says he is banned because there is video evidence that he brought an "apparatus" with him into council chambers on June 4. That apparatus was his wooden snake.

"That is correct," Di Lullo said in an email to the Record on Friday. The clerk will be leaving his job in Cambridge to become chief administrator for Middlesex Centre on Aug. 6.

Di Lullo's letter didn't mention the wooden snake, so Dettweiler was bewildered at first.

"I have my walker with me but I don't think that's it," said Dettweiler, a past provincial and federal election candidate who has run for the Libertarian party in Cambridge, Kitchener-Waterloo and Huron-Bruce as far back as 1990.

"Then I got thinking about it. I took my snake, my fake snake along one night. It's a wooden snake. It's kind of made up into a hundred little sections so it wiggles around. It fools a lot of people, but it's wooden. I put it around my neck. He might have hissed a few times. I might have helped him."

Dettweiler, who ran against current mayor Kathryn McGarry in past provincial elections, said he got no warning about his fake snake on June 4.

McGarry said she and Di Lullo decided on the one-year ban in the wake of Dettweiler's three-month ban from January.

"You just cannot have the public acting in an intimidating way to either members of council or staff or the public," McGarry said. "In his case ... we've looked at former history."

When followup sanctions are applied, the length of such ban is often increased.

"We need to up this amount of time now so that they get the message," McGarry said.

The letter speaks of Dettweiler's conduct at the meeting and the "not appropriate" apparatus he brought with him into council chambers.

"The City has an expectation for members of the public that they will behave in an orderly fashion during the meetings of council," the letter states.

"Your actions during the meeting on June 4, 2019 (are) unacceptable and will not be tolerated. I would suggest that you familiarize yourself with the public decorum policy that the city has for members of the public."

Dettweiler says he seldom speaks as a delegation at council. But at a January meeting, he delivered a brief verbal outburst from the gallery.

He wonders what might happen if he defies the ban.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

"I'm tempted to go down to the council chambers with some other thing to see if they call the cops," he said. "I think the cops might have a laugh at it. They might tell me to get going. But a snake? A snake? Sammy. My pet snake."

jhicks@therecord.com

Twitter: @HicksJD