It’s the Public’s Business

It doesn’t exactly inspire public confidence when a government panel considering financial disclosure rules bars the public from its discussion.

Letting the public in, of course, is the whole point of disclosure. But when it met this month to talk about whether the public has the right to know who is funding secession movements in the San Fernando Valley, the Harbor area and Hollywood, a subcommittee of the Local Agency Formation Commission kicked the public out.

“We need to be able to take our coats off,” Pico Rivera City Councilwoman Beatrice Proo, who chairs the subcommittee, told members of the public as she showed them the door.

Who’s stopping her? The notion that having the public present somehow stymies public officials from having a frank and honest discussion of the public’s business is nonsense. That frank and honest discussion is exactly what the public wants to hear--and needs to hear. To be shut out of the room is to be deprived of the chance to learn of and try to address a concern--or a lack of understanding or a prejudice.

Of course, public officials are not keen on revealing their ignorance or their prejudices, which is why they often prefer to keep such “frankness” behind closed doors. Or beneath coats, as it were.

Human nature does not always beget good public policy. Open meetings laws exist to counteract the all-too-human desire to shut the door.

A lawyer for the county counsel’s office claimed this particular closed meeting was a “workshop” and thus exempt from the state’s open meetings act. That’s debatable. But even if true, it doesn’t make closing the meeting right any more than the loophole in state campaign laws makes it right for Valley VOTE, the group pushing Valley secession, to repeatedly refuse to disclose all the names of those bankrolling what is obviously a political campaign.

The state Legislature last session closed that loophole, at least partially, by authorizing the state’s 57 LAFCOs to require disclosure of contributions. What the new law doesn’t do, for reasons having to do with the types of issues these commissions normally address, is require LAFCO to do so.

The law does mandate a public hearing on disclosure, which will likely take place early next year. At least Proo won’t be able to close the door on that.

LAFCOs typically oversee small-time boundary changes. The Los Angeles commission is studying the breakup of the nation’s second-largest city. The potentially enormous consequences of its decision cry out for the most open process possible.

Before she was shut out of the subcommittee meeting, LeeAnn Pelham, the head of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission, urged the adoption of disclosure rules.

“It’s important for people to be aware of who is trying to influence the LAFCO decision-makers,” she said.

The subcommittee is charged with recommending what--if any--rules the full commission should adopt on disclosure. It’s important that people know who is trying to influence its recommendation.