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Council Postpones Sunshine Ordinance Until At Least January

By Charlotte Perry-Houts
Friday October 01, 2010 - 12:34:00 PM

Tuesday's City Council worksession on the Sunshine Ordinance for open government ended with Mayor Bates' promise that “we will bring this item back into the Council in January. And we will be ready to make it happen.” The Sunshine Ordinance, an attempt to make city governance more accessible to the public, has been on the table in various forms for the last ten years and has seen 24 drafts by the City Attorney. The ordinance is an attempt to improve upon the “minimum standards” set by the Brown Act of 1953 and the California Public Records Act of 1968. 

The only public comment at the worksession came from Sherry Smith, President of the League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville. She voiced the LWV's support of a Sunshine Ordinance and named a number of components that the LWV would like to see in an ordinance, including the release of the Council agenda packet at least one week earlier. 

The Citizens Sunshine Committee gave a twenty-minute presentation regarding their most recent draft of the ordinance. The group has drafted three different versions of the initiative between January of 2009 and May of this year, awaiting city staff's fiscal analysis and response to each. 

The main concern of the city staff has been the cost of implementing the ordinance, estimating that the CSC's most recent draft represents $2 million in “ongoing annual costs.” The CSC disputed that number, saying that the staff estimate includes technological upgrades and modernization that ought to be made regardless of any ordinance. 

The CSC also argued that payroll expenses are very high because the city governments doesn’t have up-to-date technology, and that the time spent servicing Public Records Act requests alone could be reduced by 100 hours per week with the right technical assistance. “The bottom line is the staff estimates reflect a profound extreme and shockingly wasteful fiscal management,” stated Roger Marquis, the CSC's information technology consultant. 

The staff's Power Point presentation focused on four primary points for an ordinance: the agenda process, the conduct of meetings, how public records are made available, and the possibility of an advisory commission for the ordinance. They committed to the Council that they could have a draft ordinance prepared by January for consideration. 

Everybody on the council, on the city staff, and from the CSC claimed to have the same ultimate goal. Councilmember Max Anderson said that it is to have “an open government that is responsive to the citizenry, and still allows us to proceed in a manner that we don't induce some self-imposed paralysis on the government.” 

Councilmember Kriss Worthington pointed out that there are a number of points in the ordinance that are not particularly controversial on which most of the council seemed to agree. Nobody argued against the need for a more accessible venue for council meetings or the need for an easier-to-navigate website. Everybody agreed that the meetings should not run later than 12 a.m., with most councilmembers wishing that they would not run past 10 or 11 p.m. 

It also seemed that everybody wanted an earlier release of the Council agenda packet, which would give the public as well as the councilmembers more time to study the issues being presented at the meeting. Since the CSC's ordinance will likely be approved for the November, 2012 ballot, but will probably not be passed before then, Worthington recommended that the Council take action on passing those non-controversial sections of the ordinance at the next available opportunity, most likely at the upcoming January discussion. 

[This article first appeared as an Extra last week.