Legality of Board’s Action Is Questioned : Meetings law: Antelope Valley school officials say they did nothing wrong, but critics say they violated the Brown Act.

The monthlong process that led to the appointment of an Antelope Valley high school district trustee last week has raised questions about possible violations of the state’s open meetings law.

Although state law and court decisions say the actions and deliberations of school boards generally must be done in public, the brief school board session at which the appointment was voted on Wednesday came only after a series of private activities by board of trustee members and the district’s superintendent.

The process has led critics and some school board hopefuls to charge that board members violated the open-meetings law by allegedly deciding on their pick long before the actual 4-0 vote. Some also are upset the school board did not call an election to fill its fifth seat.

Officials in the Antelope Valley Union High School District, meanwhile, say they did nothing wrong, noting that the vote on the appointment was listed on the board’s agenda, and it occurred in public. “It was all perfectly aboveboard, the whole thing,” said board president Jarold Wright.

However, the behind-the-scenes process leading up to the appointment of former board member Bob McMullen, 56, to a vacant seat included activities by district officials similar to those that in past cases have been found to be improper by courts and the state attorney general.

Specifically:

* School board members acknowledged discussing how to fill the vacancy and McMullen’s possible appointment during a June 20 board study session that was open to the public. The issue was not listed on the agenda, however, as the law generally requires to alert interested citizens.

* Two school board members, Wilda Andrejcik and Sophia Waugh, said district Supt. Kenneth Brummel telephoned them, and possibly other board members as well, sometime before the study session to ask if they favored McMullen’s appointment. Both said they told Brummel they did.

* Three board members--Andrejcik, Waugh and Steve Landaker--said they received memos from Brummel regarding the appointment issue and discussed it with him by telephone before the vote. They said the communications dealt with others who were interested in the job and the district’s inquiries into the legal issues raised by McMullen’s possible appointment.

Court decisions and the state attorney general’s office have said that boards that receive information or discuss or decide on issues in private may be in violation of the Ralph M. Brown Act, the state’s open-meetings law.

The state Court of Appeal in 1985 ruled that a telephone poll that enables a public board to reach a collective decision constitutes a private meeting and is a violation of the Brown Act. The ruling is considered the dominant case in California law on the subject.

Between the June 13 death of former school board President Larry Rucker and the board’s July 18 appointment of McMullen, district officials provided almost no public information about their plans to fill the vacancy and refused to disclose the names of any candidates, including McMullen’s.

Board members last week said they had no regrets about keeping the appointment process private. “From what I have gathered from other school boards, it’s been done this way, without the public’s input or anything” Waugh said.

Yet in its 1989 guide to the state’s open-meetings law, the attorney general’s office, citing court opinions, concluded that “if communications to the body or among members of the body” contribute to reaching a decision or gathering information about an issue “the public generally has a right to be involved.”

The guide also says that if board members communicate privately before making a public decision “the public is able only to witness the shorthand version of the deliberative process, and its ability to contribute or monitor the decision-making process is curtailed.”

According to school board members, McMullen, a 12-year board veteran who gave up his seat in November and moved to Cambria, was a front-runner for the job from the start. At Rucker’s June 18 funeral, McMullen, who is a retired utility company employee, expressed interest in rejoining the board and said he was returning to Lancaster, they said.

Two days later, after Brummel had met with McMullen to talk about the job, the school board held its study session. Such meetings generally draw few members of the public. Waugh and Andrejcik said board members asked Brummel to research several legal issues as a prelude to appointing McMullen.

At that time, Waugh and Andrejcik said, they felt a majority of the board, without voting, had agreed to appoint McMullen if issues about his residency and board bylaws requiring an open search could be resolved. They said only Landaker voiced reservations, saying he preferred an election.

Brummel said he did not recall the appointment issue surfacing at that study session, although he said it may have. The official minutes he kept for the meeting do not reflect it. Brummel also said he did not think the board had in any way violated the Brown Act.

McMullen, meanwhile, drove 200 miles from Cambria, a small town in San Luis Obispo County, to Lancaster to attend the board’s meeting last week. He also registered that day to vote in Los Angeles County, which is a requirement for him to hold public office here. Before the vote, McMullen told a reporter he knew he was going to be appointed and had been told so, but refused to say by whom.