Assemblymember Diane Papan’s legislation would undermine 70 years of progress for local government transparency.
Residents in local communities across California could soon walk into the meeting room of their city council, school board, planning commission or county supervisors only to find no one at the dais and the policymakers on a monitor on the wall.
The bill would gut some of the key provisions of the Ralph M. Brown Act, the California open-meeting law for local government signed into law in 1953 in response to news reports that elected officials often conducted public business in private. Back then, members of a city council, for example, would hash out decisions in advance and then merely formalize them, often without discussion, at an open meeting.
Papan argues that the pandemic showed us that videoconferencing could increase public participation as more people from home watched and commented during meetings of their local government boards. On that point, she’s right. We should encourage greater public engagement in local government, whether in person or by videoconferencing. And there was nothing in the law — even before the pandemic — to prohibit government agencies from enabling public participation through video technology.
That said, there are good reasons for remote participation by board members. People may have health issues or family emergencies that require them to participate by computer. But that should be the exception, not the rule.
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