City Council to attend workshops in shifts
CITY HALL — Only three of the seven City Council members will attend upcoming workshops on gang violence and future development in Santa Monica.
The city’s top leaders this week criticized a state law designed to keep government transparent as having unintended consequences. The Brown Act precludes full council participation in workshops and forums that are not run as traditional public meetings.
“It seems nuts,” City Councilman Bob Holbrook said Thursday. “We can’t attend. We can’t even sit there and listen. We can’t even be sitting there, in the last row, gagged, listening to people.”
Public officials under the Brown Act are banned from doing the city’s business behind closed doors. That means no more than three of the seven council members can discuss any one item outside of a formally noticed meeting. It also means no more than three council members can attend an informal city meeting or forum.
The issue came up last month before a major community workshop regarding an overhaul of the land use element, a document that governs development throughout Santa Monica. It became more contentious this week as City Hall began planning major forums for addressing gang violence in Santa Monica, one on Feb. 26, the other on March 12.
City Attorney Marsha Moutrie, who routinely advises officials of possible Brown Act conflicts or appearances of conflicts, defended her advice at a City Council meeting this week.
“It is not my interpretation of the Brown Act, it is what the Brown Act says explicitly,” Moutrie said. “If the city puts on a community meeting, a majority cannot attend without following all the formalities of the Brown Act.”
Following the Brown Act to the letter of the law would mean agendizing the meetings, holding a formal roll call and keeping to a structured itinerary for public input and other procedural matters. Doing so would threaten the fluid and flexible format of community workshops, and may affect the type of input residents offer, officials argue.
There is an exception to the law in regards to community meetings sponsored by outside groups. City officials can attend those meetings, as long as they don’t conduct city business. Though there was an opportunity to have the upcoming gang violence forum sponsored by State Sen. Sheila Kuehl, City Manager Susan McCarthy said the city opted to keep control of it.
“Had we not helped to shape the workshop, it would not be a hands-on, community workshop,” McCarthy said. “It would have been a talking-heads workshop and I think it’s going to be good the way it is. I don’t apologize for making the suggestion, though definitely it’s possible that we would have suggested something else had we known” that council members would be precluded from participating in the meeting.
In an effort to work around the Brown Act restrictions and still have council participation, members of the council agreed to attend the meetings in shifts. Mayor Pam O’Connor will attend the entire Feb. 26 meeting and City Councilman Herb Katz, who serves as the mayor pro tem-pore, will be present for the March 12 meeting. The other five council members will rotate through the meetings so each can have a turn participating.
“I’m happy to split the shift,” said newly-elected City Councilman Bobby Shriver. “It’s very important to me, since I’m starting out, to attend these.”
To quell the public’s concerns that elected leaders aren’t vested in the process, council members asked that it be made clear that they are forbidden from attending the meetings.
Moutrie said a note should be included on fliers advertising the meetings, then suggested the idea could be taken even further.
“You know,” she said, “if this gets really bad for you, and you want me to show up at the beginning of those meetings for five minutes and hold forth about the Brown Act, I’ll do that, because I certainly don’t want you criticized for a process law which is there to protect the public, and the public’s business being done appropriately.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 11, 2005. Read the original PDF.