The Law Says Open It Up

The five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors are to be praised for burying the collective hatchet and venturing up north to meet with Gov. Pete Wilson in a united front. They were right to express, as forcefully as possible, their grave concern about how his budget proposals would affect our cash-strapped county.

But we do have a bone to pick. California law explicitly requires that all meetings of a “legislative body” be “open and public.” Their gathering obviously constitutes a meeting and thus should have been open to the press. It wasn’t. Reporters were barred from what was termed an “informal” session between Wilson and the supervisors that addressed Wilson’s plan to shift $2.6 billion in property tax revenues away from counties, cities and special districts to support the public schools.

The closed doors certainly appear to have violated the spirit and the letter of the Brown Act--also known as the California open meeting law. The 40-year-old statute requires that local governments conduct their business in public. Closed-door discussions are permitted only to discuss security, personnel matters or pending litigation; none of which was the case here.

The supervisors insist that they were not holding a meeting but merely conveying their individual views to Wilson. But they went to Sacramento together, as a group--as, indeed, the Board of Supervisors. Yes, they did the right thing Tuesday in pressing L.A.’s case to the governor, but they did the wrong thing in keeping the public out.