California lawmakers are trying to use the remote-meeting experience of the COVID pandemic as an excuse to permanently gut public access to critical government boards.
In April, we warned about troubling legislation by Assemblymember Diane Papan, D-San Mateo, that would shield local officials like those of a city council or school board from having to appear at public meetings. The Assembly has delayed consideration of Assembly Bill 1379 until next year.
Meanwhile, another Bay Area legislator seeks to similarly hinder public access to meetings of powerful state agency boards such as the Public Utilities Commission, Air Resources Board, Coastal Commission, Board of Parole Hearings, and the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.
If Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, gets his way with Senate Bill 544, commissioners could actually phone it in as they make decisions on everything from setting PG&E rates to protecting our coastline to disciplining bad cops. And members of the public who want to attend meetings could be left in empty rooms listening to voices of the decisionmakers emanating from a speaker. The Senate passed Laird’s bill in May, and the Assembly is preparing to consider it.
These two bills are affronts to Proposition 59, the 2004 initiative passed by California voters that embedded the mandate for open government into the state Constitution: “The people have the right of access to information concerning the conduct of the people’s business, and, therefore, the meetings of public bodies and the writings of public officials and agencies shall be open to public scrutiny.”
The two bills also would undermine the principles of California’s premiere open-meeting laws — the Ralph M. Brown Act for local government and the Bagley-Keene Act for state boards — which seek to ensure that government officials conduct their business in public so that their constituents can watch them in action.
The Brown Act was 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.
We must not regress.
Yet that’s what Papan and Laird would have us do. They advocate for allowing board members — indeed, an entire board at the same time — to regularly participate in public meetings by phone from remote locations. They wouldn’t even have to participate by video; they would never have to show their faces.
Video participation by public officials makes sense during a public health emergency involving a highly contagious virus. But it’s not appropriate as the permanent practice for participation.
As we 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. And there were the officials who hid by turning off their cameras; constituents often didn’t know if their representatives were even paying attention.
To be sure, there are good reasons for remote participation by board members. People might have health issues or family emergencies that require videoconferencing. 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, such as a city council chamber, where the public can be present.
That’s reasonable balancing that preserves public access yet accommodates legitimate, limited exceptions for board members to participate remotely.
That’s not what Papan and Laird propose. Lawmakers should permanently kill both bills.
—The Editorial Board, Bay Area News Group
