Prosecutor Backs Open-Meetings Law

A Ventura County prosecutor has predicted that revisions to California’s open-meeting law, scheduled to go into effect April 1, will make it more difficult for local governments to conduct public business in private.

“The new Brown Act will help strengthen the resolve of public officials to keep the public’s business public,” Assistant Dist. Atty. Colleen Toy White said Thursday at a Camarillo seminar on the pending revisions.

Sponsored by the Ventura County Press Club and the law firm of Nordman, Cormany, Hair & Compton, the panel discussion featured views of the law by a newspaper editor, a city attorney and local prosecutors.

Don Coleman, a Ventura County special assistant district attorney, said the law will for the first time give prosecutors the power to file civil lawsuits against accused violators.

Under the current Ralph M. Brown Act, which was passed in 1953, no local government has ever been successfully prosecuted. Because civil lawsuits do not require the same standards of proof, Coleman said the change will add teeth to the open-meeting law.

“There will finally be an incentive for government to do the right thing,” he said.

Oxnard City Atty. Gary Gillig, who has clashed in the past with Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury over interpretations of the existing law, criticized the revised act for requiring ad hoc committees to meet openly.

Public access to such meetings will “inflame the public and give news to the newspapers, but will interfere with effective governing,” Gillig said.

“Forget your confidential stamps, folks,” Gillig said he would tell Oxnard officials. “You work in a fishbowl.”

Julia Wilson, editor of the Ventura County Edition of the Los Angeles Times, said the new provision, while tightening up the Brown Act, can still be abused.

“Open government depends on the goodwill of public officials,” Wilson said. “I suspect some lawyers and politicians will still find ways to keep information hidden.”