Union Urges Probe of Supervisors’ Secret Vote

Health aides who care for the elderly filed a complaint with the Los Angeles County district attorney on Friday, alleging that the Board of Supervisors criminally violated state open meeting laws by secretly voting to kill a proposed ballot measure.

The district attorney’s office has assigned a prosecutor to review the complaint to determine whether an investigation is warranted.

“We’re hoping the district attorney’s office will hold these officials accountable,” said Tyrone Freeman, president of Service Employees International Union Local 434B. “No elected official is above the law. We hope the district attorney’s office will take the proper steps to ensure that it never happens again.”

County Counsel Lloyd Pellman denies that he or the board violated any open meeting laws.

The supervisors voted 4-1 in closed session on Dec. 18 to instruct the county counsel to ignore his legal requirement to prepare a ballot title and summary for an initiative to increase the aides’ salaries.

Unless the county registrar-recorder receives those documents, the proponents cannot begin to gather signatures to qualify for the November ballot, stopping the proposal in its tracks.

The decision, opposed by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, was not reported to the public. The matter was revealed this week, through county documents obtained by The Times.

The union is complaining that the matter should have been discussed in public.

Pellman was the first to suggest to the board that he could kill the measure by refusing to do the required work. He eventually decided that would be illegal and called a majority of the supervisors to discuss the issue.

By making those calls without posting notice of a meeting, the union and Supervisor Gloria Molina contend that he further violated the open meeting law.

Molina claims Pellman also violated the law because he did not call her office before making the decision.

“I said, ‘Excuse me, this is not the way the system works,’” Molina said in an interview. “In another instance that would be called insubordination.”

“It was not only a [open meeting law] violation, but more importantly, this is my lawyer,” she added. “It’s his responsibility to make sure that we as supervisors are not violating the law.”

Molina said she consulted local and state prosecutors about what to do about her colleagues’ alleged violation of the open meeting law, and that they told her she should ask the board to correct the wrong.

She said she then scheduled a series of follow-up closed session meetings to discuss the violation and possible reprimands against Pellman. She also dug into her office budget to briefly hire a lawyer specializing in ethics to represent her in the issue.

The final result was that the board last month passed written rules for closed-session meetings.

Molina said she voted in the Dec. 18 meeting to kill the initiative after the board was advised by Pellman that it was a legal option.

Supervisors are opposed to the measure because they believe it would usurp their budgeting power and set a bad precedent for workers asking voters for raises.

“Am I supposed to just wait for all the unions to put all their issues on the ballot and divvy up the budget?” she asked.

Yaroslavsky said he cast the lone dissent in that December meeting because he thought the county should not interfere with the initiative process. “It’s just wrong,” he said.

Molina said the matter has left her with a distrust of the county’s top lawyer.

“I think there should have been a personnel action that this board should have taken, and none was taken,” Molina said. “I have to make decisions based on legal advice that’s given to me.” If the supervisors are found guilty of violating the open meeting law, they could be held criminally liable for a misdemeanor, which carries penalties of up to six months in jail or $1,000 fine.

Criminal charges have never before been brought for violation of open meeting laws in California, said Dave Demerjian, head deputy district attorney over the Public Integrity Division.

Since the unit was established by Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, several elected bodies have been investigated and accused of violations. Ultimately, those cases were resolved without prosecution when the accused officials corrected the actions, Demerjian said.