Opinion: Brown Act not stopping illegal meetings
By Daniel Borenstein, Bay Area News Group
The principle underlying California’s local government open-meeting law is simple: The public’s business must be conducted in public. Yet 62 years after the passage of the Brown Act, some elected leaders still don’t get it.
The most recent example comes from Emeryville, where a majority of school district trustees met privately with the superintendent and construction manager before a board meeting last month. They say they reviewed costs for a joint city-school district project for which the board later that night approved issuance of another $4.5 million of bonds.
It’s amazing that elected officials hold such closed-door gatherings more than six decades after Gov. Earl Warren signed legislation outlawing them. Indeed, these are the very sorts of meetings that led to the Brown Act.