Emery School Board President, Superintendent Called to Account by Local Press

From the Contra Costa Times and the Oakland Tribune:

Daniel Borenstein: Six decades after Brown Act passage, elected leaders still hold 

illegal meetings

By Daniel Borenstein dborenstein@bayareanewsgroup.com © 2015 Bay Area News Group

Emery Unified School District board member Donn Merriman; John Affeldt, president; John Rubio, superintendent; and Melodi Dice, vice president, clockwise from upper left, are photographed during a board meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2015, in Emeryville, Calif. The board members and superintendent participated in a Nov. 18 that was in violation of California's open meeting law. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)

The principle underlying California's local government open-meeting law is simple: The public's business must be conducted in public. Yet 62 years after the passage of the Brown Act, some elected leaders still don't get it.

The most recent example comes from Emeryville, where a majority of school district trustees met privately with the superintendent and construction manager before a board meeting last month. They say they reviewed costs for a joint city-school district project for which the board later that night approved issuance of another $4.5 million of bonds.

It's amazing that elected officials hold such closed-door gatherings more than six decades after Gov. Earl Warren signed legislation outlawing them. Indeed, these are the very sorts of meetings that led to the Brown Act.

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