What the Bell (scandal) tolls: elected officials make it hard for citizens to know what they're up to

     One great thing about the “Bell” scandal is its tendency to direct our attention to what goes on in the halls of government—especially, small-town government.
     Shit happens, man.
     As somebody who attempts to keep tabs on the doings of the SOCCCD board of trustees—a tiny world, I know, though serious public money is spent in it—I know that groups with power will get away with things if you let ‘em—if, that is, nobody’s paying attention, which is pretty much the way it is with many city councils and school boards and community college boards of trustees.
     Today, in the Voice of OC, Terry Franke (general counsel for Californians Aware) explains that the Bell scandal was likely inevitable, “given the gaps in the Brown Act and the newspaper publishing tradition that once provided small towns with a watchful eye and a voice to be reckoned with.”
     That seems right to me. It’s harder and harder to get newspapers to cover district news—they’re spread too thin, as their reporting staff shrinks closer and closer to nothing. Newspapers sit in one spot; they are institutions. And so they have memories and understand context, relative to their town. Bloggers have a hard time achieving that kind of understanding, and so they’re not as prepared to keep watch. As Franke explains, this kind of reporting “must be done with the community memory and professional savvy almost unique to newspaper-trained journalists with experience watching small-town politics.”
     That's very plausible.
     --Now, the Brown Act, which was designed to lay the workings of government out in the open, to the greatest degree possible. It's about "transparency," as they say.
     I am proud to say that I was the petitioner in two successful Brown Act challenges to our lawless and secretive board of trustees (a dozen years ago). In fact, the district lawyer (his name was "Covert") referred to these lawsuits as Bauer I and Bauer II.
     California’s Brown Act is wonderful—except that many “legislative bodies” ignore it or work with dubious interpretations of its verbiage. That was part of the problem with our district in the late 90s. For instance, they claimed that a total reorganization of the district had been properly agendized—for a closed session—as an employee evaluation!
     So people don't always follow the law. Further, as Franke explains, the Brown Act ain’t perfect. It’s a decent net, but it's got some pesky holes in it. Writes Franke,

California's open meeting law …, even if perfectly complied with, does not make it hard for Bell-like excesses to creep in. ¶ For example, while the city council's approval of salaries … should have been done in an open meeting…, and while such an action should have been listed in clear language on the agenda for the meeting at which it occurred…, the Brown Act requires only that the agenda be posted in a single physical location within the city…. ¶ It does not require Internet posting, and while Bell's web page does display council agendas and minutes, they cover only the current year, and show no such action.

As for the three hyper-compensated [Bell] employees, their performance …is not required by the Brown Act to be reviewed in public, and the law also allows closed sessions for the council to consider the basis for any pay increase. Final action on any raises or benefit increases must take place in open session …, but needs be given public notice only on a single sheet of paper under a thumbtack … on some wall in the city.
. . .
In sum, the long absence of a community newspaper … left Bell … a perfect swamp. The Brown Act, cultivated … by the newspaper industry, virtually assumes that newspaper reporters will be on hand to use it in scrutinizing government behavior. But even reporters require a bit of periodic training to help them decode agendas and read between the lines of official meeting bureaucratese that the Brown Act is just vague enough to permit as barriers to ordinary citizens.

     You might want to examine one of the SOCCCD’s board agendas to see the latter problem. In many ways, it is as though some elements of our board’s agendas were designed to hide, rather than to reveal, what’s about to go down.
     I gave an example of this a day or two prior to Monday’s meeting of the SOCCCD board. I focused on the phenomenon of trustees attending conferences. If trustees seek to attend a conference—with all expenses paid for by the district—they must make a request. Such requests are to be agendized for an open meeting. The majority decides whether to honor these requests.
     On Monday, the board (minus trustee Nancy Padberg) voted to approve someone's “request” (if you can call it that) to attend a conference in Orlando, Florida.
     But, in truth, we don’t really know, though we can reasonably infer, that anyone actually requested attending that conference. And, in any case, we do not know who that trustee was! That’s largely because of the format in which the information was presented on the agenda. The agenda information (called “exhibit A”) sports a heading that implies that it is reporting a past event rather than indicating “requests” to attend an event some time in the future. The puzzling heading is followed by something even more puzzling. We see the phrase: “trustees wishing to attend,” followed by a colon. But we are given no list of trustees. Rather, we are then given the title of a conference (or multiple conferences) and the costs to the district per trustee.
     The last agenda’s “conference request” item listed two conferences and their cost. Also included was a column for “trustees currently registered,” where we found that “none” of the trustees fit that description for either conference.
     Does that mean that no trustees were requesting attending these conferences? Probably not, for, if there were no trustee requests to attend these conferences, then there would be no point in an agenda item. And so we can only guess, I suppose, that a trustee seeks to go to, for instance, that stupid Mickey Mouse conference in Goofyville (Orlando), Florida.
     During Monday’s discussion of this item, Trustee Padberg noted that the Orlando conference was expensive (about two grand) and provided nothing that could not be acquired locally and thus more cheaply. Nevertheless, the item passed, with six yays to Padberg’s solitary nay.
     (Why?)
     Meanwhile, the public has no idea, really, if anyone requested this conference. It certainly has no idea that it was John Williams (I’m guessing)—a fellow notorious for going to fancy hotels in Orlando (and sometimes other far-away locales) for weeks per year at the taxpayers’ expense. (He has family there. He's a county official, and he gets away from the pressures and burdens of scathing Grand Jury reports about his performance there.)
     As I was leaving the board room after Monday’s meeting, I happened to run into a group of administrators exhibiting worry or consternation. It is only because of that curious observation (I didn't talk to them; don't wanna get people in trouble!) that I eventually learned an important fact. The usual trustee signatory of the just completed college accreditation reports had refused to sign them. In fact, judging by the board meeting alone, with regard to the accreditation issue, everything was hunky dory: during the meeting, the reports (one per college) were presented and then “accepted” by the trustees. Unanimously. And that was that.
     But no. Evidently, that was not that. Not at all.
     How is a member of the community to learn this?
     (Well, they could read Dissent the Blog.)
     If I have time, in the coming days, I’ll provide other examples of curious factoids about what goes on in the SOCCCD that are hard to find, even for someone who scours those crazy agendas. (Quickly, another example: the curious fact that chief OC Republican shyster lawyer Phil Greer was paid a quick $25 grand for helping Chancellor Raghu Mathur negotiate his unhappy exit from that office and from the district. If I hadn’t reported that fact, I don’t think that many in the district would know about it. AND IT STINKS. Not that I can get any reporters to report on it!)
     With any luck, this “Bell” hullabaloo will last a while and will raise the profile of small-time government actions and deliberations. And maybe people will start paying attention.
     Probably not.
     Um, anyone out there? Hello?