Why, if I'm the Brown Act, I Feel Violated

The Ralph M. Brown Act is essentially California’s open meeting law. Simply put, it requires that meetings of public bodies, which includes meetings of the Board of Trustees, be open and public. Included in the law is the requirement that agencies like the board of trustees has to treat documents as public. All documents not exempt due to such issues as personnel or union contract negotiations that are given to board members also have to be provided to the public. If a board member gets it before the meeting, so should the public. If a board member gets it during the meeting, so should the public.

In the mess with the closing of last winter, preliminary boundary information was given to the Board members during the meeting but it was not provided to the public nor was its discussion on the agenda. At the time, a number of us complained, and we continued to complain in later meetings. Trustees promised it wouldn’t happen again.

As is my habit every other Tuesday, I attended the board meeting on Oct. 18. The agenda provided to the public included an item “Consideration of a Community Day School,” and a two-page document about the item was also included. When the meeting rolled around to that item, lo and behold, a financial analysis was distributed to board members and other staffers sitting around the board table. CFO Karen Mahoney discussed the analysis, and the board spent the next 10 minutes discussing it and the community day school.

I checked my meeting materials. It wasn’t there. I walked over to the table where the binder intended for the public was. It wasn’t in there, either. There were no other items on the table for the public to review.

There are protocols in the board meetings. Trustees have repeated on a number of occasions that it is their meeting and there are times when the public can speak to items on the agenda. And then there are times when the public cannot speak. In the midst of the discussion of that item, there was no opportunity for public comment or public queries of, “Yo, where’s my copy?”

I went home after the meeting and requested a copy from Public Information Officer Leslie Benjamin. I received it Thursday morning. In the meantime, I contacted the Marin County District Attorney’s Office. The primary inspector for alleged Brown Act violations was out of the office until Oct. 25. I spoke to another inspector, who, after talking with me and reading my e-mail outlining where I believed the Brown Act was violated, indicated I should wait for the other inspector’s return.

When Inspector Michael McBride did return, he quickly followed up on my allegation and spoke with Superintendent Shalee Cunningham. McBride then followed up with me, first via telephone and then with the letter I’ve posted here. I will respectfully disagree that copies were “placed on a table in the meeting room,” unless the table being referred to was the board’s table. Remember, I checked. And, me being me, I made an elaborate show of checking.

Dr. Cunningham has only been here since July. I don’t know that she would necessarily know the requirements of the Brown Act. But the trustees themselves? Oh, yeah, they know. They knew. And the best they could muster at the time was, speaking of the board members, “We should have been provided this in advance.”

Yo, we, too!