Informal, Private Meetings Held by Legislators Draw Complaints

Public interest advocates complained Wednesday that, despite a voter-approved ban on closed meetings by public officials, legislative leaders continue to meet informally in secret to discuss--and influence--the fate of bills.

The meetings technically do not violate long-standing laws regulating lawmaker gatherings, but opponents charge that they violate the spirit of Proposition 112. That measure, approved June 5, included a provision to strengthen laws prohibiting legislative committees from meeting in private.

But just one day after Proposition 112 passed, an informal “screening panel” of powerful senators convened privately to consider 57 bills, among them one by Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco) that would have extended open-meeting guarantees to such advisory committees.

The Legislature has a long-standing tradition of senior lawmakers meeting in private to set priorities for big-ticket spending bills. Lawmakers argue that those gatherings do not violate the open-meeting laws because the legislators do not constitute a quorum of any committee.

At the June 6 meeting, five senators, including Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) and Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Presley (D-Riverside), considered bills worth $2 billion, Presley said in a telephone interview. He said that they recommended the Appropriations Committee place a number of bills in its “suspense file”--meaning little hope of passage--including Kopp’s legislation, with an estimated fiscal impact of about $100,000.

“I was flabbergasted,” Kopp said Wednesday. “That bill should not have gone into ‘suspense.’ It was below $150,000, and under committee policy those bills are automatically passed out.”

Open-meeting advocates immediately blasted the senators’ move. “That should no longer be permitted,” said Ruth Holton, a lobbyist for California Common Cause. “We believe it’s a serious problem whenever important decisions are made in private and the public has no way of knowing why one bill was chosen over another. That decision ought to be taken in regular budget hearings.”

Presley said the screening group rejected Kopp’s bill because “it didn’t seem to be a big priority. We had just passed (Proposition) 112, which enlarges the scope of the open-meetings law and that seemed to be sufficient.”

Presley also defended the existence of the screening group. Because the Appropriations Committee has to consider hundreds of spending bills, senators need a method of setting priorities, he said. “It’s the only way we can think of to deal with the problem of all these bills. You have to do the screening to cut the bills down to a manageable number.”

But Michael Dorais of the California Newspaper Publishers Assn. said: “I think it violates the spirit of Proposition 112. The spirit of 112 is that the decision-making process ought to be an open one. And this wasn’t open to the public.”