Private Vote, Public Matter

It’s ironic that a decision about opening up city government would be made behind closed doors. But that’s what the San Diego City Council did recently when it voted 7 to 1 in closed session to offer to put a measure on the June ballot to expand the council.

The council justified the secrecy because of the need to settle a lawsuit brought by the Chicano Federation, which wants council districts increased from eight to 10 and an independent board named to redraw district boundaries.

State open meetings law allows attorney-client discussions of pending litigation to be conducted in private if public debate could jeopardize the government agency’s legal position. But the intent of the state law clearly favors openness.

As the Brown Act states in its opening paragraph: “The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.”

The San Diego City Council, however, all too frequently favors secrecy.

This year in private sessions, for instance, the council appropriated about $2 million to fight the merger of San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison, canceled the Air/Space America show (a decision later reversed) and reviewed cost estimates for the secondary sewage treatment system--all under the umbrella of the pending litigation exemption of the open meeting law.

Litigation is an area where the line between the public’s right to know and the need for confidentiality to protect the public’s legal and fiscal interests is sometimes hard to define.

But, given the prevalence of litigation in today’s world, elected officials should err toward openness.

Whether or not the council’s action in the Chicano Federation lawsuit met the technical requirements of state law, decisions on changing the very structure of government are not ones that should be made in closed session.

This is especially true in a case where the issues at hand have had such a troubled history. Expanding the council and having an independent board rather than the council redraw district boundaries were among the recommendations of the Charter Review Commission. The council had originally promised to put the recommendations on the November ballot, but it later reneged on that promise, a decision that reactivated the lawsuit.

So the council had no business then taking the matter out of the public eye. The public had a right to know the thinking and rationale for a settlement offer that could significantly alter city government. Why, for instance, did the council offer to put the matter on the June ballot rather than the November ballot, a decision that would postpone the expansion until 1993.

Changing the structure of government is a highly political endeavor, which should be conducted in public. To do otherwise smacks of the kind of back-room politics that the Brown Act was designed to combat and the very kind of politics the Chicano Federation is seeking to change.