"Nixonian dragnet" in L.A. County

Open-government activist and attorney Terry Francke has penned a blistering column chastising the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for launching an investigation into leaks to the L.A. Times about the county's troubled child welfare agency.

Francke writes:

...the state’s largest county, which may be doing the state’s worst job in child welfare, is reacting to newspaper reports on the heartbreaking results of its failures by loosing the hounds to find who in its ranks furnished reporters with the facts.  In blithe dismissal of the Brown Act, the board of supervisors majority even initially used an unlawful closed session to hear, discuss and approve top bureaucrats’ request for the witch hunt.

The pretext for this Nixonian dragnet is that laws for the protection of minors’ privacy have been violated. While that may or may not be the case, the question pales beside the issue of whether those laws are anything more but a pious cover for the most secretive and potentially destructive archipelago of government power in today’s society—the joined-at-the-hip realm of the juvenile dependency court and child welfare systems.

Francke advice about Bell

In the last few decades, First Amendment attorney and government-watchdog Terry Francke has done more to make small-town newspaper reporters better journalists than just about anyone else I can think of. He has generously offered his expertise to anyone who has his number, me included, and that has enabled reporters digging at the edges of local corruption to get inside scandals using tools like the public records to pressure obstinate city officials.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Francke sees the Bell corruption scandal as a direct result of the disappearance of small-town newspapers. Here he is in the Voice of OC:

...the Bell spectacle is what happens to communities without their own old-fashioned diligent news coverage by veteran newspaper reporters, or at least smart reporters led by veteran newspaper editors. The result need not be on paper, but it must be done with the community memory and professional savvy almost unique to newspaper-trained journalists with experience watching small-town politics.

 Francke argues that laws such as the Brown Act, which requires city agencies to discuss their business in public, do little to protect against the excesses of a Bell city council unless someone trained in its workings is on hand to act as a watchdog:

...the long absence of a community newspaper covering the city closely left Bell not a perfect storm but a perfect swamp. The Brown Act, cultivated over more than a half century by the newspaper industry, virtually assumes that newspaper reporters will be on hand to use it in scrutinizing government behavior. But even reporters require a bit of periodic training to help them decode agendas and read between the lines of official meeting bureaucratese that the Brown Act is just vague enough to permit as barriers to ordinary citizens.

What's needed by Bell -- or any newspaperless town that wants to avoid becoming another Bell -- is steady, consistent coverage by competent observers with journalistic talents and instincts (whatever their publication medium or platform) and some rules better than what the Brown Act now provides.

While Francke would like to see some reforms in open-meeting laws to boost transparency, he thinks it's unlikely they'd get by the government lobbies in Sacramento. The best solution, he says, is for Bell residents to turn their anger into organization:

The nice thing about small towns like Bell is that getting enough signatures to put such a reform on the ballot is a smaller task as well. If even half the people who have been storming Bell council meetings in recent days to protest the revealed abuses were to organize into a sunshine ordinance drafting and circulation committee, they could literally write (and pass) their own ticket to a transparent city hall.

*Update: City and state officials are gathering in Sacramento to talk about ways to make the pay of city officials more transparent. At this point, it feels more like a distraction from the stalled budget debate than a real effort at reform.

Silence in the courtroom

A federal judge in Los Angeles "took the highly unusual step of closing a two-day trial" dealing with the killing of Jewish Defense League activist Earl Krugel. The LA Times reports:

Constitutional scholars and press-freedom advocates deemed the broad secrecy accorded the trial by U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson perplexing -- and a likely violation of the 1st Amendment.

Terry Francke at Californians Aware notes:

The Times apparently learned of this closure only after the fact. In the old days of an abundant reporting staff, that would not have happened, and Times lawyers would have almost certainly filed a challenge to the order immediately.

Free-speech bankruptcy bailout plan

Earlier this week, the Sacramento Bee editorialized against a troubling court ruling that has left a free-speech group and its former president, Richard McKee, saddled with $86,000 in legal bills and weakened California's free-speech protections.

The ruling, which the Bee called "Orwellian" and the state Supreme Court refused to review, essentially took a law designed to stop government agencies from using the courts to silence their critics and turned it into a tool government agencies could use to silence their critics.

Here's what McKee had to say about the bizarro ruling in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin:

After prosecuting 14 other Public Records Act and Brown Act cases, McKee said he had never heard of the district using the right to free speech as a way to win a case.

The school district can take tapes of meetings and "chop it up, eliminate pieces, because of their right to free speech," McKee said. "Can you imagine how nice it is to control the information to the public? It's so ridiculous you don't know where to start."

The Bee has called for legislative reform to cure this ill, and McKee said that's exactly what he and Terry Francke of Californians Aware plan to do.

"We've kicked some ideas around and believe it could be as simple as changing the anti-SLAPP statute to preclude it from being used in a Brown Act case," McKee told me in an email. The Brown Act protects free speech at local government meetings and the anti-SLAPP law is the one designed to keep the same agencies from silencing critics by dragging them into an expensive lawsuit.

McKee and Francke are looking for a state lawmaker willing to carry the legislation.

Meantime, Francke has made a plea for financial help, since McKee has had to foot most of the $86,000 bill himself. I have already pledged to do my part, which involves subsidizing one of his favorite hobbies at the pub of his choosing.

Bankrupting free speech

The public's right to monitor its government is in trouble.

Open-government activist Richard McKee has waged a tireless battle to ensure government agencies do their work in the light of day. Over the last decade or so, the Pasadena City College chemistry professor worked to enforce California's Brown Act and Public Records Act with a gadfly's tenacity, but always with a goal of promoting the common good.

Never punitive, McKee always made an effort to reach out to recalcitrant government officials before resorting to lawsuits - the only mechanism by which the public can enforce these laws. McKee, who is not a lawyer, often ended up in court despite his best efforts. He drafted his own arguments and won far more cases than he lost.

I don't know of a newspaper in Southern California that hasn't benefited from McKee's work, either through his court victories or his free advice. Indeed, McKee often gave reporters just the boost they needed to get over the wall of obfuscation put up by government agencies trying to shield their corruption, or embarrassment, or plain bad decision-making.

Now Mckee finds himself on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars because of a wrongheaded court ruling that says he and advocacy group CalAware must pay Orange Unified School District's legal fees from a case they brought four years ago after the district censored one of its board members.

From CalAware founder Terry Francke:

This month ... California courts finalized an order that a small public interest non-profit group and its past president must pay nearly $86,000 for merely asking them to protect the public’s right to hear the opinions expressed by its local elected representatives.

-snip-

...McKee, whose wages have already been garnished by OUSD, and who has had a lien placed upon his home by the district, is left to scramble to come up with the remaining $80,000. He’s already paid $59,000 of it through a second trust deed on his home, depleted his savings, and is now taking another $16,000 from a tax shelter annuity. How he will come up with the remainder is uncertain.

Francke also makes an appeal for financial help:

To help Rich McKee stop the hemorrhage of his life savings to answer this liability and to help CalAware build its resources to fight for open government in the future, send a tax-deductible charitable gift check marked “Legal Defense Fund” to Californians Aware, 2218 Homewood Way, Carmichael, CA 95608, or contact Terry Francke by e-mail— info@calaware.org —or phone—(916) 487-7000.