The Brown Act is in the news this month, via reports that the state government had gutted it. These accounts are not only wildly overblown, they miss the real story of the evolution of this landmark law in the nearly six decades since it was first passed.

The original Brown Act legislation stemmed from a 10-part investigative series in the San Francisco Chronicle called “Your Secret Government.” The League of Cities embraced reform and persuaded Assemblyman Ralph M. Brown to introduce the bill, which was signed into law by Governor Earl Warren. Originally only 686 words when it went on the books in 1953, it still carries some of the original straightforward eloquence of a more innocent time:

The Legislature finds and declares that the public commissions, boards, and councils and the other public agencies in this State exist to aid in the conduct of the people’s business … The people of this State do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know … All meetings of the legislative body of a local agency shall be open and public.

The law has since become part of California’s civic DNA. Elected and appointed officials almost universally abide by it, some enthusiastically, others more grudgingly. What the act hasn’t done is prevent the worst abuses–because corrupt officials deliberately and secretly evade them. The Brown Act was no barrier for those who granted themselves bloated raises and pensions in Bell, to pick a brazen example. On balance, though, the Brown Act has undoubtedly made local government more open and transparent, if sometimes at the cost of accomplishing the people’s business at the local level.

That’s because the law now runs nearly 15,000 words of mind-numbing detail that no human being could possibly retain and still have brainpan left over to perform an actual job in government. And while the spirit of the law remains hugely beneficial, the letter of the law has also had plenty of unforeseen adverse consequences.

Among the amendments that have bloated the law to elephantine proportions were provisions to forbid legislative bodies from going on often expensive and effectively secretive “retreats.” The legitimate purpose of such gatherings (if there was one) was to focus on the thorny challenge that Rodney King famously posed: “Can we all get along?” Given diverse philosophies and personalities, all too many public bodies suffer dysfunction that can poison public business. What’s wrong with getting everyone away for a weekend to confront and defuse the thorny personal differences that can divide a Council and thwart effective governance?

Good riddance to that well-meaning idea when the Brown Act was altered to forbid boards from gathering outside the borders of their jurisdiction. The amendments were so onerous, however, that the California League of Cities was even forced to drop trainings aimed at promoting harmony among groups of city councils.

If you’ve ever sat through a City Council meeting where “colleagues” do every spiteful thing except heave dead cats at each other, you might long for the bad old days when “retreats” could be held at some reasonable remove to foster candor and preclude playing to the local crowd.

Such trade-offs pale in comparison to all the salutary benefits of sunshine on local government. But the current controversy over the Brown Act obscures the important distinctions between what’s essential about the act–and what isn’t, and thus could use fixing. As a starting point for a sensible discussion, Californians should understand the law has barely been touched and certainly not gutted, no matter what you read in the papers. In reality, our state legislature “suspended” part of the law (which doesn’t apply to them) to save $96 million in state reimbursements to local governments for the cost of posting meeting agendas outside City Halls up and down the state. Ironically, the obscure provision was tucked into a mammoth budget package and received no public scrutiny until after it was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown (no relation to the act’s sponsor).

The specific provisions suspended by the Legislature for the next three years are relatively trivial. In today’s world, the most effective posting of meetings is on the Internet, which costs the State nothing, so that practice is unlikely to change at all. Another provision about disclosing the results of “closed sessions” (which are only allowed in exceptional situations) will also be iced, but that too is unlikely to actually cause many agencies to alter their practices. In fact, these same Brown Act requirements were suspended by the Legislature during the 1990 fiscal crisis with little impact on local compliance. Although this new “suspension” will change very little, the Brown Act’s symbolic power ensures impassioned rhetoric on the topic. There’s even a threat by a State Legislator to (wait for it) launch an initiative to enshrine all the complicated provisions of the Brown Act in the California State Constitution (already among the longest in the world after the constitutions of Alabama and the nation of India.)

But before we pass a proposition to cement every provision of the Brown Act into our Constitution, we might reflect on the wisdom of the ancient Athenians, the inventors of democracy. We “must know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible,” Plato quoted Socrates as saying, capturing the essence of the “Golden Mean” celebrated by the Greeks.

When it comes to the Brown Act, let us praise its authors and faithfully follow their intent, but let us be skeptical about whether “suspension” of some of its most inconsequential provisions constitutes an actual threat to our liberties.

Rick Cole is City Manager of Ventura. His views are his own.

*Photo courtesy of scottjlowe.

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Another Sunday, another dreary Southern California scandal.

We’ve gotten used to opening up the paper and routinely seeing some new abuse of unchecked power. The most recent one concerned the guardians of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, storied home to Olympics and Trojan horses.

Late last month, the Los Angeles Times took a close look at the Coliseum and found inflated salaries, self-dealing, and details of the sort to make taxpayer blood boil. Not many of us like to see our public officials spending “thousands of dollars on Riviera Country Club golf tournaments, hotels, steakhouse lunches and Bel-Air Country Club breakfasts”–or a leased Jaguar, $2,196 for massages, or “$500 for a procedure to treat snoring.”

The revelations have led to predictable results: the general manager was forced out, two top officials are on paid “leave,” and Commission member Rick Caruso resigned, “ending a stormy tenure during which he clashed frequently with fellow panel members over their stewardship of the stadium,” as the Times put it. Controller Wendy Greuel has announced an audit, and District Attorney Steve Cooley has launched a criminal probe amid inevitable calls for “reform.”

Okay, so let’s talk about reform.

There is no end to these scandals, but for some reason no one makes the connection between ongoing abuses and shelves of thick reports done over the years pointing out the fiscal lunacy of having 6,500 units of “local” government in California.

No, that’s not a typo. California has 58 counties, 482 cities, 72 community college districts, 1,131 school districts, and a whopping 4,779 “special districts.” The latter provide a bewildering array of specialized services–from treating sewage to operating libraries, running airports, and spraying for mosquitoes.

I’m not sure whether the “Coliseum Commission” is included in this staggering total. Its governing structure is even worse: it’s a hybrid run jointly by the State, County of Los Angeles, and City of Los Angeles. In the task of keeping an 88-year-old stadium solvent without booking concerts that lead to the deaths of 15-year-old girls from drug overdoses, Coliseum overseers have failed spectacularly.

Are you really surprised?

Of course, the Coliseum scandal will continue to spawn headlines, and we’ll exorcise some symbolic demons. New management will “clean up” abuses. The Commission will again fade from public scrutiny. And then something else will happen. When unsupervised civil servants work with showbiz and sports promoters, what else should you expect?

What’s far more disturbing than these infuriating, but essentially petty, thefts is that our 6,500 units of government in California are charged with important public functions. They are as invisible as the water and sewer pipes and gas lines beneath our streets, and no one notices them, including the press, unless they develop into giant sinkholes, erupt in stinking scandal, or blow up in our faces.

We are about as far from the ideal of “town hall democracy” as it is possible to travel in 150 years. Not even a reasonably well-informed citizen can keep track of what all these local government agencies are up to or who’s running them.

I first stumbled into this vast labyrinth of hidden government when I was mayor of Pasadena. That put me on three boards governing “sanitation districts”–a polite name for the gatherers of household and business sewage for downstream treatment (and pumping out into the Pacific Ocean).

Since Los Angeles County is made up of 88 adjoining cities, it doesn’t make any sense to have 88 separate stinky plants and pipelines to the sea. That’s why, years ago, some nameless civil engineer corralled 78 of them into a united entity called “Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County.” Note the plural. It’s a coalition, like the eurozone, governed by 23 boards.

These “boards” met twice a month, and each conducted a separate charade of convening, transacting business, and adjourning. How long did those “meetings” take? About a minute and a half. Each member of each board was paid $100 for this arduous service, plus gas mileage to the Sanitation Districts’ campus in Whittier. There were always fresh cookies and coffee from the districts’ cafeteria. I liked the gooey chocolate chip.

Local elected officials love to “represent” their jurisdictions on these boards. Who wouldn’t? In two years of attending meetings, I never saw a member of the public or the press. Although the Districts at the time had stashed more than a billion dollars in cash in the bank, none of the boards lingered more than a few seconds in adopting the annual “budgets,” which were confined to a single page.

It did occur to me that there was something amiss about all this. So when the second year of budget adoptions came around, I brought the well-oiled machinery to a halt. To adopt the budget for the entire agency, each of the 23 compliant boards has to acquiesce. One day, when there were just two out of three of us board members present, I voted no, causing a one-to-one deadlock.

I was quickly surrounded by panicked, and resentful, elected officials. Eager to cut things short, they quickly consented to my demand that a finance committee be formed to scrutinize the overall budget for more than a matter of seconds.

That was the end of my brief career as a crusading reformer, however. Other duties kept me away from the next meeting. The boards abruptly repealed the imposition of a finance committee and resumed their untroubled operation. My mayoral term ended–along with my $300 monthly stipend and supply of warm cookies.

I’ve never read of subsequent scandals at the agency. But the Sanitation Districts’ manager at the time is now enjoying an annual retirement pension of $271,055.88, the fifth-highest in California. I doubt you’ve ever heard of him, despite the millions of dollars paid out during his tenure to clean up the pesticides and toxic industrial chemicals that the Districts allowed to be dumped into our coastal waters.

If we actually wanted to prevent scandal, we wouldn’t leave the cookie jar unguarded. Everyone knows that having unaccountable agencies leads to abuses. The solution is clear: consolidate these obscure agencies into coherent local governments so that the public and the press can keep an eye on them.

Sure, consolidation comes with its own trade-offs. Bigger government seldom works as well as smaller government. Human greed and sloth can infect big, visible agencies as well as small ones. But the abuses are harder to hide. The tiny city of Vernon is the classic example. For decades it operated like a crooked casino, with a handful of insiders taking obscene salaries and perks. Say what you will about city or county government, but that kind of grand larceny would not go unchecked for three generations.

We’ll never have perfect government, but it’s vital to have someone minding the store. That requires a public understanding of who’s running public functions like water, airports, libraries, parks, and, yes, sports stadiums. Scattering accountability for these among dozens of interlocking and overlapping entities is bad business. It perpetuates bad government.

So instead of announcing belated audits and investigations, let’s dust off the expert studies on how to reorganize local government along sensible and cost-effective lines. That way, way we won’t have to keep reading about bureaucrats getting taxpayer money to treat their snoring. The greater good would be served–even if some people would lose their access to free chocolate chip cookies.

Rick Cole is the city manager of the City of Ventura. His views are his own.

*Photo courtesy of scgpt.

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Sound like your dream job?

There are half a dozen cities in Southeast Los Angeles in immediate need of someone answering to that job description. Half a million people live in our region’s “rustbelt,” a swath of non-descript towns that if you don’t live there, you wouldn’t have any particular reason to visit. Ever.

For the past twenty years, the rest of Southern California studiously ignored their political machinations – except as mildly diverting filler between traffic reports on news radio. “City manager indicted in Bell Gardens.” “Councilmember shot in South Gate.” “Mayor convicted in Vernon.”

Until the Soviets invaded in 1978, “Afghanistan” stood for the remote part of the world that, by definition, could never make the front page of an American newspaper. Four people killed in a car crash in your hometown was front-page news. Forty thousand Afghanis killed in an earthquake got two lines in “World Round-up.” For as long as anyone can remember, cities like South Gate were Afghanistan to the L.A. media.

Until Bell. Until a scandal was accidentally uncovered that was so grotesque that the whole nation paid attention, however briefly.

Read much about Bell lately? Didn’t think so. To its credit, the Times still churns out more stories on Bell in a month than it used to in a decade. But the mainstream Los Angeles media give more in-depth coverage to Westside restaurants than the hometowns of half a million Latinos who populate the hard-working underclass of our metropolis.

This being an era when most people are preoccupied with their own issues, it may be naïve to pretend that people would – or even should – care about whether kids in Huntington Park have after-school recreation programs, or whether there are enough cops to bust a drug house in Maywood. Not when everyone is fixated on “Carmeggadon.”

Still, the trash in those towns must be collected. The bad guys need to be arrested. And the kids should have fields to play soccer.

Those prosaic responsibilities fall to public employees in postage-stamp cities with broken budgets, outmoded technology and hide-bound bureaucratic structures.

Good luck with that.

And if councilmembers and city managers can’t overcome long odds and make local government work at the heart of the most populous region of the ninth-largest economy in the world? Then we condemn a whole generation of prospective citizens to a future of stunted hopes, broken dreams and missed opportunities.

Of course, local government services aren’t working particularly well in vast sections of the City of Los Angeles either. As with the Dodgers, L.A. is becoming a textbook example of mismanaging world-class assets – or “brands” as we call them today.

But while leviathan scale and big city politics afflict Los Angeles, there are scores of smaller cities throughout Southern California successfully delivering high-quality public services at the neighborhood level – where it counts. The tragedy is that where such services are needed the most – in cities crowded with aspiring immigrant families – local government is barely functional.

This would be utterly depressing except for one thing. We’ve been here before.

A century ago, crusading journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote a book called, “The Shame of the Cities.” Still referenced in American history books, the bestseller catalogued the misery and corruption spawned by big city political machines. It helped spur the Progressive movement into a juggernaut of reform. The Progressives not only brought us the initiative, referendum and recall; they instituted city planning, public health departments, kindergartens, civil service protections, public utilities and the direct election of Senators. But in particular, “The Shame of the Cities” led to the creation of an innovative approach to local governance: the Council/Manager form.

It promised clean and efficient city government, freed from the grip of political bosses. Part-time citizen politicians would be confined to passing laws and setting policies. They would cede all administrative functions to a non-political “city manager.” What model did reformers look to for such a civic Galahad? Not to corporate CEO’s (those didn’t emerge until the rise of General Motors.) No, the first city managers were usually civil engineers, rational problem-solvers who applied “scientific management” to municipal challenges like crime, disease and poverty.

Ironically, the model never caught on in the biggest cities. Yet outside San Francisco and Los Angeles, it was almost universally adopted throughout California, where it remains in place today, reliably producing vital local services.

Irony of ironies, though, the Council/Manager form was twisted beyond recognition by Robert Rizzo, the wizard of Bell.

Rizzo exploited the system’s shortcomings when applied to managing the region’s rustbelt cities. While idealism fueled the pioneering city managers, gradually professionalism lured the most talented city managers to the cities that boasted the most financial resources. City managers in poor cities were too often inexperienced rookies or worn-out hacks. The hardest cities to manage were left to those least capable of managing them. That made them vulnerable to ruthless opportunists like Rizzo. This would have been disturbing – if anyone had been paying attention.

Few were – and now, these cities are in desperate condition.

Desperate situations arguably call for desperate measures. I’ve previously advocated putting these municipal basket cases into receivership, to be reorganized by the courts. That solution gained exactly zero traction. When the Attorney General timidly asked a judge to allow appointment of an “overseer” for Bell’s paralyzed city government (four councilmembers, the former city manager and former assistant city manager all under indictment), the idea was summarily dismissed.

Absent a modern-day Progressive Movement, is there any hope for another source of reform?

South Gate offers some hope. Before Bell, South Gate was ground zero for municipal corruption. Prior to going to Federal prison for looting nearly $20 million from that city’s treasury, Albert Robles briefly controlled a City Council majority and installed his choice for City Manager. Rampant abuses led to their ouster in a recall. The new Council implored the League of California Cities to come to their aid. A team of volunteers led by retired manager Gary Milliman did such an outstanding job of cleaning up the mess that he was asked stay on, even though he spoke no more Spanish than it takes to order tacos.

After restoring a semblance of normalcy to the stricken city, Milliman was succeeded by one of the profession’s bright lights, Dr. Ron Bates, a lifetime civil servant who’d also served as a mayor of an Orange County city and president of the Southern California Association of Governments.

Replicating the South Gate miracle, however, would require luring a steady stream of administrative saints to the Southeast cities. It’s a fond hope, but probably not a realistic one.

It might be more practical to build on Governor Jerry Brown’s brainchild when he was Mayor of Oakland. Mayor Brown created a military academy for inner city youth. Perhaps the State or some major foundation could train an elite cadre of ambitious young public servants to serve five-year terms as city managers in the rustbelt towns of inner city Los Angeles or the impoverished farm towns of the Central Valley. Upon completion of their service under those battle conditions, they’d be highly employable in more advantaged communities.

There may be other alternatives for tackling the hard, but vital work of city management in our toughest arenas. But what’s not acceptable is to throw up our hands or hide our eyes. Even if our collective conscience can ignore the blighting of kid’s lives in our region’s most blighted neighborhoods, our self-interest can’t. We can’t compete in the global economy if we hobbled by hundreds of thousands of non-starters. Police, parks, streets and libraries are hardly glamorous topics. But in poor cities they are vital lifelines.

Bell was a wake-up call. We hit the snooze button at our peril.

Rick Cole is the City Manager for the City of Ventura.The views expressed in this article are his own.

*Photo courtesy of Luton Anderson.

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