(Mod: As anyone who watches or perhaps even attends our City Council
meetings will tell you, it is a pretty frustrating process. We now have
a situation where 3 obviously collusive individuals make all of the
decisions for this entire community, which is unfortunate for a unique
town such as ours as each of them is more closely tied to the
destructive policies of Sacramento, Los Angeles County and the Edison Mafia
than what the people actually living here want. The undermining of our
long-standing citizen committee system in order to supposedly
accommodate the scheduling convenience of "staff" being only the latest
of many steps to take the people out of the process ... City Watch
is this great site that covers the affairs of that large city down the
road a bit, and they on occasion post something that should also be
discussed here. I thought today I'd repost one of them today.)
Is Civic Engagement Illegal? (
click here): Everyone
knows the standard public meeting in America: formal agenda handouts,
official presentations, and three-minute speeches at the microphone for
citizens. It’s boring. It doesn’t work.
And it’s mysterious—because the past two decades have seen the
development of meeting strategies and online tools to change all that,
to make meetings truly productive and dynamic. So why don’t American
public meetings change?
One major obstacle is legal. The country’s open meetings and records
laws include many specific, rigid requirements for how elected officials
communicate, meet, and make decisions. For instance,
California’s Brown Act
severely limits communication between elected officials outside of
formal meetings. So a school district that uses an online tool to put
members of the school board together with parents may very well be
violating the law.
While there are often good reasons behind the laws, many of the rules
are unclear, and changes in technology and society have made them even
harder to interpret. Lawyers fear that if the standardized procedures
are junked and citizens are allowed to participate directly in budgeting
or planning decisions, either online or in person, any decisions they
make will be under a legal cloud.
Since the old processes of citizen participation offer little real
interaction or deliberation, citizen turnout is usually very low;
lawmakers often refer to the few people who turn up as the “usual
suspects.” On the other hand, if the community has been gripped by a
controversy, turnout is often high, and the three-minute commentaries
from citizens can last long into the night. (One of the more popular
video compilations on
YouTube is a set of outrageous three-minute
statements by citizens and responses by public officials, culled from
public meetings all over the country.)
[Peggy Drouet: The link to the YouTube video is not given here or in the City Watch article and I haven't been able to locate it.] But neither extreme is helpful.
Many local leaders understand that society and technology have changed,
and they want to use new online tools and engagement processes. They
also want to involve citizens more directly in budget cuts and other
difficult decisions. “If we think we’re going to come out of this
recession and expect everything to go back to normal, we’ve got another
think coming,”
Harry Jones, county executive of Mecklenburg
County, North Carolina, once told me. “We need to reach out and reframe
our relationship with citizens—the people who are the ultimate source of
our revenues.”
Over the last two decades, Jones and many other local leaders have
pioneered a new generation of participation practices. These include the
use of citizens’ juries and other deliberative processes that allow
large, diverse groups of residents to tackle hard questions. And there
are a burgeoning array of online tools to report problems, generate and
rank ideas on government policy, work in small action teams, and
visualize options for public budgeting and land use planning.
The trouble is most of these efforts occur outside the scope of official
citizen participation processes and the laws that govern them. This has
created a host of legal headaches for public officials who want to
engage the public but don’t want to face legal penalties or be subject
to litigation.
Simply put, opening the doors to civic engagement requires new rules.
Over the last year, a working group of scholars and local officials from
around the country has drafted model state and local laws that would
support more effective forms of public participation. These model laws
would exempt new types of civic engagement processes from judicial
review, as long as the processes were sound and followed principles of
transparency and fairness, with records of engagement made public and
processes open to rigorous evaluation.
In the 1980s and ’90s, laws on alternative dispute resolution were
enacted to give Americans new alternatives to judicial proceedings.
Something similar is required for public participation. We must free
elected officials and decision makers to engage the public, even as we
uphold the goals of transparency and accountability.
Reaching out to constituents, and making policy with their
collaboration, is the essence of democracy. When our public officials
try to do this, the law should be on their side.
Why is a Board of Education seat worth so much to them?
(Mod: In this week's Pasadena Weekly - click here - they tally up all the cash being lavished on political machine Board of Ed candidate Ruben Hueso. This in his District 3 runoff with Tyrone Hampton,
a candidate that would make a far better advocate for the needs of the
people in that district. And the question has to be asked, why is it
worth so much to them?)
In the primary,
Hampton, a local contractor who, according to his
Web site, graduated from Cal Poly Pomona, raised only a few hundred
dollars, with one $100 contribution coming from sitting
Board President Renatta Cooper, the board’s only African-American member and, incidentally, a Democrat.
On the other hand, Hueso, a teacher with children attending public
schools, lists a number of major out-of-town donors to his campaign.
Although the district, which was carved out of some of Pasadena’s
poorest neighborhoods and includes most of Northwest Pasadena, Hueso has
collected more than $30,000 — $1,000 from the
California Real Estate Political Action Committee, $1,000 from the local and ostensibly nonpartisan political action group
ACT, and $14,000 from the campaigns of Democratic state
Sen. Kevin DeLeon of Los Angeles and
Assemblyman Ben Hueso,
Ruben’s brother, from Encinitas. Hueso’s brother contributed $11,000
from his 2012 re-election campaign, according to the latest financial
records filed with the Pasadena City Clerk’s Office. DeLeon gave from
his 2018 Assembly campaign fund. Former state
Assembly Speaker Fabio Nuñez,
also from San Diego and running for state Attorney General in 2014,
gave Hueso $5,000 with funds from that upcoming campaign. One of Hueso’s
local supporters is Pasadena Board of Education member
Ed Honowitz, who gave $250.
This week's Green Action Committee meeting was canceled due to the lack of a quorum
Is it just me, or do these people seem kind of entitled and lazy? They
don't get their work in on time and their only real accomplishment was "
Green Accords," which they cut and pasted from some
United Nations publicity releases. Why heaven and earth are being moved by
Mayor Moran and the
City Manager is mystifying. Don't we have enough low impact people working on city business as it is?
