California lawmakers are attempting to make use of the remote-meeting expertise of the COVID pandemic as an excuse to completely intestine public entry to essential authorities boards.
In April, we warned about troubling laws by Assemblymember Diane Papan, D-San Mateo, that may protect native officers like these of a metropolis council or college board from having to seem at public conferences. The Meeting has delayed consideration of Meeting Invoice 1379 till subsequent 12 months.
In the meantime, one other Bay Space legislator seeks to equally hinder public entry to conferences of highly effective state company boards such because the Public Utilities Fee, Air Sources Board, Coastal Fee, Board of Parole Hearings, and the Fee on Peace Officer Requirements and Coaching.
If Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, will get his method with Senate Invoice 544, commissioners might truly cellphone it in as they make choices on all the things from setting PG&E charges to defending our shoreline to disciplining dangerous cops. And members of the general public who wish to attend conferences could possibly be left in empty rooms listening to voices of the decisionmakers emanating from a speaker. The Senate handed Laird’s invoice in Could, and the Meeting is getting ready to think about it.
These two payments are affronts to Proposition 59, the 2004 initiative handed by California voters that embedded the mandate for open authorities into the state Structure: “The folks have the fitting of entry to data regarding the conduct of the folks’s enterprise, and, due to this fact, the conferences of public our bodies and the writings of public officers and companies shall be open to public scrutiny.”
The 2 payments additionally would undermine the ideas of California’s premiere open-meeting legal guidelines — the Ralph M. Brown Act for native authorities and the Bagley-Keene Act for state boards — which search to make sure that authorities officers conduct their enterprise in public in order that their constituents can watch them in motion.
The Brown Act was signed into legislation in 1953 in response to information reviews that elected officers typically performed public enterprise in non-public. Again then, members of a metropolis council, for instance, would hash out choices prematurely after which merely formalize them, typically with out dialogue, at an open assembly.
We should not regress.
But that’s what Papan and Laird would have us do. They advocate for permitting board members — certainly, a complete board on the similar time — to often take part in public conferences by cellphone from distant places. They wouldn’t even should take part by video; they’d by no means have to point out their faces.
Video participation by public officers is sensible throughout a public well being emergency involving a extremely contagious virus. Nevertheless it’s not acceptable because the everlasting observe for participation.
As we discovered through the pandemic, vital interactions within the native authorities decision-making course of have been misplaced throughout distant conferences. Group teams have been unable to reveal the dimensions of their assist by the variety of folks they turned out. The general public and the media couldn’t method board members and employees earlier than and after conferences with questions.
Nuanced interchanges between elected officers as they hash out coverage compromises have been hidden from public view. And there have been the officers who hid by turning off their cameras; constituents typically didn’t know if their representatives have been even paying consideration.
To make certain, there are good causes for distant participation by board members. Individuals might need well being points or household emergencies that require videoconferencing. However that must be the exception, not the rule.
Final 12 months, a coalition of open-government advocates and state lawmakers hammered out laws that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed, balancing the necessity for transparency with respectable conditions the place distant participation is comprehensible.
Meeting Invoice 2449 limits distant participation by board members to not more than three consecutive months or 20% of conferences in a 12 months. At the least a quorum of members of the legislative physique nonetheless should take part from a single public location, corresponding to a metropolis council chamber, the place the general public will be current.
That’s affordable balancing that preserves public entry but accommodates respectable, restricted exceptions for board members to take part remotely.
That’s not what Papan and Laird suggest. Lawmakers ought to completely kill each payments.
