Supervisors’ Decisions Made Mostly Behind Closed Doors

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors makes more than 90% of its official decisions without any public debate, spending millions of taxpayer dollars on contracts, settling major lawsuits and making policy changes behind closed doors or without discussion.

Supervisors and their staffs discuss much of the county’s business in private meetings, a practice that may be illegal and that recently has become the focus of public attention.

County Administrator David Janssen meets every Monday with the supervisors individually to discuss the Tuesday agenda. And the supervisors’ deputies regularly gather to debate upcoming items in meetings. Neither Janssen’s sessions nor the deputies’ gatherings are advertised to the public, and yet substantive issues are discussed at those meetings.

That, according to open government advocates and experts, is illegal.

“They hammer out issues and take information back to the supervisors and eventually a consensus is reached,” said Richard McKee of the California First Amendment Coalition. “People who have been involved in this can see that the business is done by the time the meeting is held.”

Supervisors and Janssen defend the long-standing practice as an efficient way of disposing of routine matters.

“Nine times out of 10,” Janssen said, “by the time [the matters] come to the board the problems have been resolved. If we had to walk through the meeting item by item and vote, you’d be there for days and add no value to the discussion.”

The board’s penchant for privacy recently surfaced after the inadvertent release to The Times of records relating to the supervisors’ secret attempts to thwart an initiative last year. The district attorney is reviewing a complaint brought by a county union, and the supervisors are expected to discuss some of their practices at their weekly meeting today, when they will debate a motion by Supervisor Gloria Molina to require future closed-door board meetings to be tape-recorded.

In contrast to the private meetings between deputies and with their administrative officer, the supervisors’ public sessions are often short and perfunctory. The weekly sessions are usually over by lunchtime.

A review of county reports from a year’s worth of board meetings reveals that just 7% of the items before them are discussed publicly at a supervisor’s request. The rest are acted upon without discussion, continued to another date or are debated in closed session.

Some recent examples include:

* After Sept. 11, supervisors met privately on a number of occasions and approved $6.8 million in new spending without public debate.

* The board recently went behind closed doors to discuss smoke alarms in foster homes, a matter that supervisors said was justified by the need to protect the privacy of foster children killed in a fire.

* In at least two cases, supervisors have justified privacy by saying that their actions might invite others to sue them, a position ridiculed by 1st Amendment specialists.

* In 1999, the county’s entire $15-billion budget was debated and voted upon in 49 minutes.

While some supervisors say they favor opening their staff meetings to the public, others insist that there is nothing wrong with meeting behind closed doors, and that most of the private deliberations are administrative, not substantive. Similarly, they say the vast bulk of the undebated items are so routine that none is needed.

“It’s self-evident that there’s nothing to discuss. Public Works has decided you need a traffic sign, or the extension of contracts,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said. “The ones that are controversial or substantial, they are held” for discussion.

When questions do arise, they often are not raised during the meeting. Rather, contentious issues often are postponed to allow the supervisors or their staffs to discuss them out of public view.

Yaroslavsky said the intent of the private meetings is not malicious.

“Things don’t get continued to work out deals,” he said. “Things get continued more often than not, if it’s me, to make sure that I and my staff understand what’s being done and have a comfort level with what’s being done.”

Experts on state open meeting laws say the current web of private meetings is illegal.

In a written opinion and a pamphlet on open meeting laws, the California attorney general’s office has consistently argued that public agencies should conduct their work in public--with only narrowly defined exceptions.

“We think it likely that a court would determine that matters which have been placed on an agenda are to be deliberated and acted upon by the legislative body in a public meeting,” the attorney general’s office wrote.

The attorney general warned officials against attempting to circumvent the rules by working through their staffs.

Conversations among elected officials or their staffs that “advance or clarify a member’s understanding of an issue, or facilitate an agreement or compromise amongst members, or advance the ultimate resolution of an issue” are not allowed.

That’s what Janssen does during his weekly meetings with board members before the public session. He said that is efficient, and stressed that he does not count votes. But the attorney general has warned about the consequences of such an approach.

“If these communications are permitted to occur in private, a large part of the process by which members reach their decisions will have occurred outside the public eye,” the attorney general’s office wrote. “In this way, the public is able only to witness a shorthand version of the deliberative process and its ability to monitor and contribute to the decision-making process will have been curtailed.”

No Checks and Balances in County Government

Los Angeles County is hardly the only California government to be accused of disregarding state laws requiring public access to government deliberations.

Some state agencies have ignored public-access rights, and smaller jurisdictions throughout California have been sanctioned for their refusal to give citizens information to which they are entitled.

But the consequences are particularly far-reaching at the county, a government larger than that of many states and by far the biggest local government in California. Unlike the state government itself--with its judicial, executive and legislative branches to check one another--the county is run by just five supervisors. The supervisors, in effect, are both the executive and legislative branches of county government.

Even the sheriff and district attorney--independently elected officials--receive their annual budgets from the supervisors they occasionally are called upon to scrutinize.

The board’s commitment to open government has been questioned in recent weeks because of revelations that the supervisors surreptitiously voted 4 to 1 in December to scuttle an initiative intended to raise the salaries of low-paid home health-care aides.

Supervisors Michael Antonovich, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Don Knabe and Molina voted in favor of that move, which would have killed the initiative by refusing to provide a title and summary, without which proponents cannot gather signatures to place the measure on the ballot. Only Yaroslavsky opposed that move, which was intended to force the advocates to sue the county.

Later, when the supervisors’ lawyer, Lloyd Pellman, discovered that the board was about to break the law with that approach, he notified them and reversed course--again, without any public notice or meeting.

The ensuing controversy has pitted the supervisors against one another and caused some to publicly question Pellman’s competence as well.

“We’ve always had our issues with closed session, that too much gets put in there, and Gloria’s always trying to get things into the public light,” said Alma Martinez, Molina’s chief of staff. Molina has complained that it was Pellman’s telephone calls that broke the law, not the initial vote.

Pellman maintains that no laws were broken. A conversation about whether to sue naturally would include other options, he argued.

About two years ago, Pellman adopted a similar position, saying that the board’s debate over whether to take over a separate body, the Proposition 10 Commission, could be done in private as potential litigation because the action probably would get them sued.

Karl Olson, a San Francisco-based 1st Amendment lawyer, said Pellman is wrong.

“There has to be a specific threat of litigation,” Olson said. “It can’t just be, ‘We’re doing something stupid and we’re going to get sued,’ because then government would do stupid things all the time.”

It often is difficult even to discern what the supervisors are considering behind closed doors because many items are cryptically described on the agenda as “anticipated litigation,” “department head evaluation” or “conference with labor negotiators,” with no further detail.

The supervisors also at times “adjourn” their meetings to be continued another day. A few are continued again and again, sometimes taking on altogether new business.

That was the case, for instance, in the deliberations over the health-care initiative. The board first met Dec. 18 on a variety of issues and continued that meeting to Dec. 21 to discuss hiring a health director. The meeting was again continued until Jan. 4, but at that session the topic was Pellman’s handling of the initiative.

Issues Usually Debated in Public for a Reason

When supervisors do discuss an issue publicly, it is typically to call attention to their actions or to illuminate strongly held differences or failures of a particular county department.

On average, the supervisors’ agenda includes 76 items per week. Of those, the supervisors discuss an average of five items in public, and they generally receive a staff report on one more. About five items generally are continued to another meeting, and four or five others generally are taken up in private.

After Sept. 11, the board held a series of closed-door meetings on terrorism readiness and security. Yaroslavsky and Molina raised questions about holding one of the meetings in secret, but ultimately joined their colleagues in the back room, where they approved $6.8 million worth of new spending. Once approved, the new spending was publicly disclosed.

Meanwhile, board deputies regularly meet to discuss items before they reach the public meeting for supervisors’ approval. The county’s own lawyer in 1994 said that meetings by the supervisors’ health deputies should be posted and open to the public. The county counsel later reversed itself and allowed the meetings to be closed.

The health deputies inform interested parties of their meetings and allow them to attend, but do not formally post their agendas. Molina has objected to that format and last year briefly ordered her staff not to attend because health aides were using the meetings to make decisions and were summoning and grilling county department heads.

Knabe, while acknowledging that staff members do meet before the supervisors’ regular public sessions--and that the supervisors themselves consult with their administrative officer--nevertheless said he is confident the law is being followed.

“I make the decisions on how I vote, not my staff,” he said. “The one thing that I always pounded into my staff is: ‘Remember, your job is to gather information and give me information. You don’t speak for me in advance or say the supervisor may support this.’”