Former City Councilman Bernardi Sues L.A. : Politics: The retired official says the council violated state law when it met in closed-door sessions to discuss a community redevelopment project.

By HUGO MARTIN

Dec. 29, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Former Councilman Ernani Bernardi has sued the city of Los Angeles, claiming that two closed-door meetings to discuss a community redevelopment project violated the state’s public meeting law.

Bernardi, who served 32 years on the council before retiring in June, filed a lawsuit Monday in a downtown Superior Court, asking that a judge invalidate the decisions reached in closed sessions and force the city to hold new meetings on the issue in public.

The suit stems from closed-door sessions of the council’s housing and redevelopment committee on Nov. 8 and of the Board of Commissioners for the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency on Nov. 10. In both meetings, the panels discussed a plan to lift a spending limit in the city’s redevelopment project for the central business district.

Under a preliminary agreement, the city and county of Los Angeles agreed to lift the project’s $750-million spending cap to allow limited redevelopment projects downtown for the next 27 years.

Bernardi, a longtime critic of redevelopment projects, contends in the suit that the closed-door sessions violated the Ralph M. Brown Open Meetings Act, which requires all government meetings--with few exceptions--be held in public. One of the exceptions allows private meetings to discuss pending litigation.

But Bernardi said in the lawsuit that no litigation was pending and therefore the meetings were illegal. “The court’s intervention is necessary to prevent the committee and the commission from holding secret sessions to consider raising the cap,” he said in the suit.

A spokesman for the city attorney’s office could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon. However, city officials responding to Bernardi’s charges in the past have called the closed-door meetings appropriate because Bernardi has threatened to sue the city if it tries to raise the spending limit.