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# Brown Act lawsuit may be hard to prove
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/brown-act-lawsuit-may-be-hard-to-prove/
- Published: 2002-01-29T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-22T23:59:11.000Z
- Author: Carolyn Sackariason
- Tags: Government & Politics, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*Attorney says law may not support action*

Plaintiffs in a lawsuit looking to shorten the Santa Monica City Council’s meetings may have a hard time proving they don’t have fair access.

By simply arguing that city council meetings run after midnight, the group planning to sue the city for violating the Brown Act may not have enough of a case, said Jim Ewert, legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publisher’s Association.

The Brown Act requires governing bodies to make public meetings reasonably accessible to citizens.

“I’m not aware of any case law that supports that argument,” Ewert said. “If they are making the meetings accessible, no matter what time of the day it is, they’ve done nothing wrong... They can go 24 hours straight if they want to.”

Local attorney Rosario Perry told the Daily Press that he is enlisting a group of plaintiffs to force the council to wrap up it’s business before midnight. The suit will ask a judge to prohibit the council from going beyond 11 p.m. Perry and a potential plaintiff, Santa Monica City Councilman Bob Holbrook, say that people can’t participate in the meetings because they can run as late as 3 a.m.

Holbrook claims city officials deliberately overload meeting agendas so the public can’t be part of the process. If nothing else, the long meetings violate the spirit of the law, he said.

But Ewert said a judge most likely would follow the letter of the law, which would require Holbrook and company to prove the council deliberately makes the meetings inaccessible.

“I think you’ll have a hard time convincing a judge the council is doing it on purpose,” Ewert said. “I think without that, you’re dead in the water.”

More often than not, the council has to vote to go past the city deadline, which requires it to finish the meeting by 11 p.m. And by majority vote, the council usually ends up discussing it’s business into the early morning hours. As a result, the public, as well as some council members, give up and go home.

“I don’t think any of us in the city don’t take the Brown Act lightly and the public participation shouldn’t be frustrated,” said City Attorney Marcia Moutrie. “The Brown Act is important to the city and city officials... we will treat this seriously.”

City Manager Susan McCarthy said setting the agenda is always a challenge and city officials constantly look for ways to shorten the meetings. But because the council allows so much public participation, it’s difficult to manage time.

If the council was to go to weekly meetings, instead of bi-weekly as they are now, city staff would spend more time preparing reports and noticing them to the public would be in a shorter time frame, she added.

“There has not been a solution that has uniformly solved the problem or we would be doing it,” McCarthy said. “There is not a perfect formula.

“Regardless of what happens on a lawsuit front, we are always looking at solutions,” she continued. “One key factor is the extent of public turnout for an issue.”

Ewert thinks the issue is political rather than a legal one.

“My experience with meetings that go long is that the council is allowing them to speak,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much more Democratic a council can be.”

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 29, 2002.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/012902.pdf?ref=smdp.com)