Residents in local communities across California could soon walk into the meeting room of their city council, school board, planning commission or county supervisors only to find no one at the dais and the policymakers on a monitor on the wall.
The elected or appointed representatives might be participating from home or out of state. Lobbyists could be at their sides telling them what to say or how to vote, and the public would never know. Residents won’t be able to discern if their officials are paying attention or talking to others on the phone if their cameras are turned off.
That’s the world of local government that would be made possible if Assemblymember Diane Papan, D-San Mateo, gets her way. Her pending legislation, Assembly Bill 1379, would undermine 70 years of progress that today enables Californians to watch — in person — their local officials’ policymaking process.
The bill would gut some of the key provisions of the Ralph M. Brown Act, the California open-meeting law for local government signed into law in 1953 in response to news reports that elected officials often conducted public business in private. Back then, members of a city council, for example, would hash out decisions in advance and then merely formalize them, often without discussion, at an open meeting.
The law has been repeatedly amended since then to address unanticipated issues and evolving technology. But the overriding principle has remained: Elected officials should conduct their business in public so that their constituents can watch them in action. Exceptions have been carved out for some confidential personnel matters and legal issues. But, otherwise, the public is entitled to observe in person the deliberation and decision-making process.
During the pandemic, local government officials used videoconferencing after they were temporarily permitted to conduct their meetings online. It was appropriate during a global health emergency — but it’s not the way that local government bodies in California should permanently function.
Papan argues that the pandemic showed us that videoconferencing could increase public participation as more people from home watched and commented during meetings of their local government boards. On that point, she’s right. We should encourage greater public engagement in local government, whether in person or by videoconferencing. And there was nothing in the law — even before the pandemic — to prohibit government agencies from enabling public participation through video technology.
But videoconferencing should not become an excuse for public board members to avoid in-person accessibility to their constituents. For, as we also learned during the pandemic, important interactions in the local government decision-making process were lost during remote meetings.
Community groups were unable to demonstrate the size of their support by the number of people they turned out. The public and the media could not approach board members and staff before and after meetings with questions. Nuanced interchanges between elected officials as they hash out policy compromises were hidden from public view. There were also the technical glitches and officials who hid by turning off their cameras; constituents often didn’t know if their elected officials were even paying attention.
That said, there are good reasons for remote participation by board members. People may have health issues or family emergencies that require them to participate by computer. But that should be the exception, not the rule.
Last year, a coalition of open-government advocates and state lawmakers hammered out legislation that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed, balancing the need for transparency with legitimate situations where remote participation is understandable.
Assembly Bill 2449 limits remote participation by board members to no more than three consecutive months or 20% of meetings in a year. At least a quorum of members of the legislative body still must participate from a single public location, like a city council chambers, where the public can be present. AB 2449 provides for a test period, through the end of 2025, to see how well the provisions work.
The test period has just begun. Yet Papan wants to throw out all that hard work and ram through legislation that could make remote participation by board members the norm. Under her bill, AB 1379, there would be no limit on how many times an individual board member could participate remotely because of, for example, work travel, child care needs, emergencies or contagious illness.
The Papan bill only requires local government agency board members to show up together for an in-person meeting twice a year. Just twice a year. What a farce. There are not even requirements that would make those two meetings more than perfunctory gatherings. The rest of the time, your representatives could be camped out anywhere.
That’s not the open government that Californians expect. That’s why journalists, news organizations, open-government advocacy groups, and organizations as diverse as the ACLU and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association oppose AB 1379.
It would be a horrible regression for public transparency.
Source: www.mercurynews.com