Briefly permitting state officers to take part in conferences from house or from secret areas by cellphone, Zoom or different digital means made excellent sense in 2020, to allow authorities to perform with out spreading illness.
However California’s COVID-19 state of emergency resulted in February. The general public well being justification for lawmakers and state commissioners to do their public enterprise out of public view has ended.
But lawmakers are attempting to hold on to pandemic-era emergency guidelines that suspended open assembly legal guidelines. Final yr, for instance, they prolonged the state open conferences exception via July 1. That extension expired simply over per week in the past, so now the Legislature is mulling SB 544, which might make the previous emergency guidelines everlasting.
In the event that they succeed, Californians will lose their vital proper below the Bagley-Keene Open Assembly Act to be in the identical room as their representatives who make selections on problems with public significance. It might be a backward step for democracy.
By no means once more would Californians have the precise to observe and handle members of the Board of Parole Commissioners in particular person whereas they take into account whether or not to launch a prisoner, for instance, or look members of the Coastal Fee within the eye whereas discussing whether or not to require non-public property homeowners to allow seaside entry.
The identical is true of the Fee on Peace Officer Requirements and Coaching, whose job contains listening to immediately from members of the family of individuals killed or injured by police. It’s true of the Board of State and Group Corrections, which not too long ago ordered two Los Angeles County juvenile halls to shut and accredited reopening one other. It’s true of the Public Utilities Fee, the Air Sources Board, the California Water Fee, and the numerous different state our bodies that make important spending, rule-making and adjudicatory selections. It’s true of the Legislature itself.
Personal companies are weighing the pluses and minuses of retaining work-from-home patterns that characterised the worst a part of the pandemic emergency, and that’s tremendous for them. However, as ought to be apparent, it’s a wholly totally different matter for the elected and appointed officers who do the folks’s enterprise. They should come to work, the place the general public can see them, hear them, query them, even scold them. That’s an important a part of their job.
One good consequence of the pandemic emergency was requiring governmental our bodies to let the general public attend conferences by cellphone or different digital means, and that’s a profit value protecting. In any case, these conferences are the general public’s enterprise and the general public ought to have the ability to select — come to a session of the Legislature or a state fee in particular person, or pay attention in on-line or by cellphone.
It doesn’t work the opposite manner round. Lawmakers, state commissioners and board members might have gotten used to phoning of their appearances and by no means having to face the folks, however that period ought to lastly finish. Let’s hope the members of the Meeting Governmental Group Committee hear that message loud and clear — and possibly even in particular person — after they take up the invoice on Wednesday.
