Editorial: DA needs to investigate EDC supes
Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the July 18, 2014, Mountain Democrat in Placerville.
Some of you may have noticed the My Turn column July 2 by all four members of the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors. [The same editorial was posted July 4 in Lake Tahoe News.]
Unusual.
Also, illegal.
Yes, there was no regular item on the board’s agenda for them to approve whoever wrote this on their behalf. It’s been clear to us for a long time that none of the four has ever exhibited a talent for writing. And now it’s also clear none seems to have a talent for knowing the law. Even if one board member happened to actually put together a few bullet points and a lot of general PR pabulum, it still required approval from the other three.
We’re sticking with the theory that someone on staff or someone on contract wrote this 864-word piece.
Why is this illegal? It violates the Brown Act that is also known as the local government open meeting law. Under Section 54952.2 (b) of the Brown Act, “… any use of direct communication, personal intermediaries or technological devices that is employed by a majority of the members of the legislative body to develop a collective concurrence as to action to be taken on an item by members of the legislative body is prohibited.”
The operative word here is “prohibited.”
For the four members of the Board of Supervisors to sign their names to this requires action. To act requires communication. Because this did not appear on an agenda item for the board members to vote in public they either did it secretly behind closed doors without notice or they approved it one at a time through the actions of an intermediary.
We call on the district attorney to investigate this, find out who the intermediary was, publicize that person and send a formal letter to the board to take corrective action for this “unlawful action by the legislative body.”
This Board has had the most dysfunction and lack of leadership or accomplishments of any in recent memory and it isn’t improving. From the Nutting scandal and lack of taking any action to remove him while he refused to leave and practiced weekly jury tampering for a year to the failed employee survey to this letter. It all shows why this Board needs to go. This is a contrived letter “backing” a heavily censored by the Amador Grand Jury and apparently disliked CAO. It is very suspect as to who prepared the letter and is another good example of the growing dysfunction. The several negative Grand Jury reports from Amador involving Daly should have made her unemployable in any public position and should be reason enough to cancel Daly’s employment. Instead, she appears to be trying to force an agenda, and millions have been misspent already. Instead of any investigation, which is mandatory, the four stooges on the Board signed someone’s prepared letter of “support” which appears to be in clear violation of the law. All of them should look for new employment and resign.
Oh yippee! More scandle and finger pointing. Nothing ever changes…