Priceless--and Costs Just Pennies

The Legislature is back in session, at Gov. Pete Wilson’s request, to address the unfinished business of workers’ compensation reform. While there, lawmakers should take care of yet another important item--overriding Wilson’s veto last week of a bill expanding the Brown Act.

The 39-year-old Ralph M. Brown Act, also known as California’s open-meetings law, requires that “all meetings of the legislative body,” including city councils, county boards of supervisors, school boards and planning commissions “be open and public.” But some public officials have unfortunately proved adept at circumventing that law. So the Legislature in August passed a bill closing loopholes. That bill expands the number of governmental bodies subject to the open-meetings law; prohibits private deal-making by public officials at out-of-town retreats; bars meetings in locations inaccessible to disabled people or where a purchase must be made to be present, and requires better public notice of planned closed sessions. The bill passed 39-0 in the Senate and 72-2 in the Assembly.

Even Wilson stated his strong support for the new Brown Act provisions. But he vetoed the bill out of concern that expanding the list of agencies subject to the Brown Act would “add substantial new state-mandated and reimbursable costs to local governments.” The state already reimburses local agencies, on request, for the expense of announcing meetings.

Following hard on the heels of this summer’s bloody budget battle, Wilson’s reasoning sounds prudent. Yet the governor signed a bill last year limiting reimbursable costs under the Brown Act to whatever it actually costs to post a single meeting agenda in a public location. The bill Wilson vetoed does not appreciably expand that definition.

Now, the cost of copying may have gone up in recent years, but it’s hard to believe that it would cost up to $1,000 a year for each affected agency to make one copy of each agenda, as has been estimated by the Department of Finance. In fact, the costs of complying with the existing Brown Act public notice mandates are not burdensome.

The Brown Act reforms are necessary and prudent. The Legislature should override.