Governing Behind a Veil

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors needs a 12-step program to overcome its addiction to secrecy. For starters, it needs to admit it has a problem. In a story earlier this week, Times reporter Evelyn Larrubia reviewed a year’s worth of county records and found that the board had publicly discussed just 7% of the items on its agendas. The rest it decided without discussion, continued to another date or moved to a closed session.

Where does the other 93% of the fact-finding, debating and deal-making required to run a $15-billion government serving almost 10 million residents get done? Behind the scenes, apparently, hashed out in closed meetings, in unpublicized gatherings of supervisors’ deputies and in tete-a-tetes between individual supervisors and county administrators. Chief Administrator David Janssen told Larrubia, “Nine times out of 10, by the time [the matters] come to the board the problems have been resolved.” He didn’t seem to realize that the public’s problems are supposed to be resolved in public.

Supervisors Michael Antonovich and Don Knabe deny or rationalize the board’s habitual secrecy. All supervisors defend at least some of these practices, saying they are efficient ways to handle routine matters that would otherwise bog down board meetings, not smarmy attempts to conceal dastardly deeds.

The problem here is twofold: First, state law prohibits the use of “personal intermediaries” to develop a collective agreement, as well as anything that can be construed as a “serial meeting” in which consensus on an agenda item is reached. Discussion, debate and even information acquisition are supposed to be open to the public. It is clear that all that has already occurred when meetings with 70-plus items on the agenda routinely end by noon. Democracy is not efficient. Second, the supervisors have lost all credibility when it comes to defending closed meetings. Sometimes they are trying to keep dastardly deeds secret.

Earlier this month, the county denied a Times request for the minutes of a closed December meeting, only to inadvertently include the documents with the denial. The records revealed that four of the five supervisors tried to quash a proposed initiative to raise the salaries of in-home health aides for the elderly. If that weren’t smarmy enough, it was also illegal, or so the county counsel, who had devised the scheme, later decided.

The board could use a refresher course on the letter and spirit of public access laws, and not one delivered by either the county counsel or chief administrator. Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky, the only one to vote against the initiative caper, and Gloria Molina offer solutions, from opening deputies’ meetings to tape- recording closed meetings. Their proposals will be taken up Tuesday. This is one meeting that is likely to last past noon.