GUEST EDITORIAL - The best way to deal with slower learners is often patient repetition of a lesson.
It seldom does much good to shout at them or to embarrass them for taking so long to pick up on what others understand quickly and easily.
And so for the five slow learners who are the members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and who requested Assembly Bill 246, and for Assemblyman Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), who wrote it, and indeed for all of the members of the Legislature who recently voted for it and sent it to the governor's desk (perhaps just to humor the supervisors), let's go over this again:
Last year the Los Angeles County district attorney's office determined that the supervisors violated the state open meetings law in 2011 when they met three times behind closed doors or on the phone with Gov. Jerry Brown to discuss public safety realignment, also known as AB 109, which puts the counties rather than the state in charge of many parolees returning from state prison, and of many newly convicted felons who formerly would have gone to state prison.
The board and the governor can certainly discuss such things. But if they are policy and spending matters of basic importance to residents, to taxpayers and to the public in general, the supervisors must have those discussions in public under the Ralph M. Brown Act, California's open government law.
The board and its lawyers cited a provision in the Brown Act that makes an exception for meetings to discuss threats to public services or public facilities. They concocted an argument that realignment could result in the release of dangerous people, and those people could theoretically pose a threat to delivery of services or access to public buildings.
But of course that argument was nonsense. (Read the rest … including how the County Supes concocted an interpretation of the law in an attempt to get around the Brown Act … here.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 47
Pub: June 11, 2013
