Results tagged “Brown Act” from Ron Kaye L.A.

EDITOR'S NOTE: When all five members of the LA County Board of Supervisors went to Washington, D.C., on May 5 and 6 to lobby the local Congressional Delegation it posted a "PUBLIC SCHEDULE OF MEETINGS." Government watchdog Leslie Dutton of the Full Disclosure Network was curious and hired reporter Janet Levy and a camera crew to cover their "special meeting" agenda, much to the amazement of the supervisors who expected to meet as as full board far from home and public scrutiny and the requirements of the Brown Act, the state's open meeting law. Levy was turned away when she tried to cover many of the meetings, which were then marked canceled. The board later posted this report of the results of its meetings but did not post transcripts of the meetings as they do routinely. Here is the first part of the Full Disclosure Network's report on what happened.


By Leslie Dutton, Full Disclsoure Network

Washington DC The public and the press was barred from attending five of the ten official public meetings called by the L A Board of Supervisors on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. on May 5th and 6th 2010, Traveling with the Board was the County's Chief Executive Officer, the County Counsel and at least a dozen of the highest ranking administrators all of who were on hand to discuss agenda items such as the Obama Health Care Plan, Funding for needy families and criminal alien assistance programs. But when the Full Disclosure reporter and camera crew showed up all hell broke loose.

EDITOR'S NOTE: City Clerk's office said today Perry and Parks voted against the Rule 23 procedure to take up DWP rate hikes. Parks, Perry, Zine, LaBonge and Krekorian voted against approving the rate hike.

Roughly 24 hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went before an emergency joint session of Congress and delivered his famous speech declaring Dec. 7, 1941 "a date which will live in infamy."

Los Angeles now has its own date that will live in infamy -- April 14, 2010.

It is the date that the City Council, in a back room conspiracy among themselves and with the mayor, blatantly trashed the rule of law.

In violation of the spirit and intend of the Brown Open Meeting Law, their own rules and the advice of their own attorney, the City Council under the direction and leadership of President Eric Garcetti took up a matter that was not on their agenda without public notice, declared a public emergency and then approved an electricity rate hike before the DWP Board had even acted, an increase that doesn't even take effect until July 1.

They did so without even making public who voted for and against.

It was all rigged in a back room deal. There was utterly no point to it other than to give the mayor a fig leaf to conceal the shame of his humiliating missteps and defeats in recent weeks. It showed the Council is just a bunch of toadies after all and their brief stand as elected representatives of the people was just a sham.

The action occurred after 3 p.m. when nearly every ordinary citizen had left the Chamber. Only one person, a man named Wayne Spindler, had lingered long enough to speak out in protest against this outrage. He ought to be honored as a folk hero, the lone voice of the people..

The urgency of this matter, the emergency, was not a riot in the streets or some crisis that could not wait a day, a week, even 10 weeks.

It was simply that the mayor and Council, with Herb Wesson of all people acting as go-between, had cut a deal to impose a 5 per cent rate increase on DWP's electricity charges, .6 cents per kilowatt hour for one quarter.

It was the same rate hike they approved previously, only to have it rejected by the mayor and his lackeys on the DWP Commission who demanded .1 of a cent more -- $6 million a quarter.

But it puts an end to the war between the mayor and the Council -- a battle that exposed just how dishonest and incompetent they all are.

It has been orchestrated all week to salvage their careers no matter what it costs the public, no matter how unjustified their actions are. Just get it off the front pages of the newspapers, off the TV news off the blogs, off the thousands of emails flashing around the city and off the table talk conversation of growing numbers of people.

They didn't like the conversation so they changed the conversation.

The conversation today will be the mayor's announcement of new leadership for the discredited Department of Water and Power, revived efforts to make LA the greenest city in America and find news to bilk the residents and businesses out of every dollar they can to feed the environmental and union profiteers.

Then, at 5 p.m., the DWP Board will convene at its own "emergency" meeting to actually approve the .6 cent rate hike they rejected two weeks ago when it could have taken effect on April 1 instead of July 1.

This would the stuff of farce if it didn't show just how tragically flawed our leaders are.

Watch how the smug Garcetti (as if he didn't know it was going to happen) reveals the DWP Board had suddenly called its meeting with only 24 hours notice on a matter that had no urgency. See how he twists the truth to invoke Council Rule 23 that allows for action on a matter of urgency "on an item not posted on its Agenda for the meeting if it determines by a two-thirds vote that the need for such action arose after the posting of the Agenda."



Even as she objects, Perry clearly knows the votes have been lined up in advance -- itself a violation of the Brown Act, the state open meeting law.

She appeals to the Council's attorney, Dion Connell, about whether Rule 16 should apply instead allowing for a new matter to be brought up during a meeting and referred to committee or set for the next agenda.
 
Connell, who does his best day after day to protect and serve his Council masters, squirms uncomfortably and declares there is nothing urgent about the issue so Perry is right, it should be brought up for a vote.

No matter. Presiding officer Dennis Zine, who started growing a beard the day he decided to cross the line and become a totally corrupt politician, ignores the legal advice and proceeds to a vote on invoking Rule 23, which passes 11-2 -- one vote more than was needed.



Who voted with Perry? We don't know because Zine turned off the tally box that appears whenever the Council votes. He keeps it off for the 8-5 vote on backing the rate hike so we don't know who was for it and who against as they got a bare majority. The video shows Bil Rosendahl and others looking up at the Council TV screens to see the vote breakdown but it never appears.

Just before the rigged vote, the clerk reminds Zine that state law requires the public be given its two minutes to speak its mind even when nothing but the pretense of democracy still exists.

That's when Wayne Spindler gets his moment of glory.



What's so pathetic about this whole episode is Garcetti's despicable gambit is meaningless, a symbolic act of surrender to the mayor's will, a symbol of our leaders utter contempt for the people, for rational processes, for robust public debate of important issues.

It was simply the price they paid to get the mayor to order the DWP to transfer the $73.5 million it promised to turn over to the general fund from surplus power revenue, and maybe $20 million more as well.

It was nothing but blackmail, and the Council paid it to free the hostage money.

DWP's financial troubles are a myth invented to raise rates 20 to 30 percent on the road to doubling and tripling them in the years ahead.
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This is DWP's third trip to the well of public money so the IBEW, the greenwashers and the green profiteers in the mayor's inner circle can get their hands on billions of dollars of the public's money.

Measure B was defeated at the polls despite Garcetti's best effort to keep secret the damaging consultant's report on the DWP.

The second effort in recent weeks also failed because there is no plan for anything except to steal the public's money, there is no transparency, no credibility.

We may not remember the date of this disgrace. But we should never forget the betrayal by our elected officials. They do it to us every day and if we let them get away with it, we become complicit in their crimes..

In a far-reaching opinion Superior Court Judge David Yaffe ruled today that the city's efforts to use agendas to obscure what they're doing like referring to an item with major environmental consequences as ENV-2007-2939-MND violates state law.

How would anyone know what that means, which is the argument attorney Robert Silverstein made on behalf of the La Mirada Avenue neighborhood in Hollywood. The community claimed the city Planning Commission's agendas explained the issues before it except when it came to those that are often the most important -- issues covered by CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act.

"The evidence before the court, which is uncontradicted, shows that the City Planning Commission of the City of Los Angeles repeatedly posted agendas of its meetings during the year 2007 that clearly disclosed each action that it intended to take or to discuss at a meeting except actions to be taken or considered under (CEQA)," Yaffe wrote in his opinion.

That wasn't the case when CEQA issues were on the the agenda. All they got was the cryptic reference of a file number.

"Such cryptic references are meaningless to most members of the public and do not in any way describe the particular action to be taken...such descriptions not only violate the Ralph M. Brown Act (open meeting law), they also violate the fundamental purpose of CEQA." 

Clear and complete information sufficient for the public to understand what is at stake is the goal of both laws, Yaffe ruled. And he is prepared to issue a broad order requiring the City to be transparent in this regard in the future -- a ruling that can be applied more widely to much of what City Hall tries to do in the dark, hidden from the public.