An San Francisco Examiner writer says that BART has reversed its practice of keeping committee meetings out of the public eye and is actively soliciting public input on a police oversight committee after a BART police officer shot and killed an unarmed man in January. -DB
San Francisco Examiner
April 30, 2009
By Melissa Griffin
A few weeks ago, I wrote that the dates, times and locations of the BART Police Department Review Committee meetings were being kept secret, despite assurances from BART’s spokesman that the meetings are public. Well, I’m happy to report that BART publicly announced the details of its April 20 committee meeting. (That wasn’t so hard, was it?)
What’s more, a mere four months after the shooting death of Oscar Grant III, the folks at BART are outright asking people to come to a meeting and discuss the formation of a BART police civilian oversight committee.
BART’s unhurried process of creating such oversight isn’t likely to be complete this year. But if you’d like to go on down and speak your peace, the meeting is 1 p.m. Saturday at the Joseph P. Bort Metro Center Auditorium, 101 Eighth St. in Oakland (across from the Lake Merritt BART station).
BONUS: There is some debate over whether the Brown Act’s public notice requirements apply to the BART police committee. However, the best argument I’ve heard so far from Terry Francke, General Counsel at Californians Aware. He wrote:
The BART board is subject to the local agency meeting law, the Brown Act (http://ag.ca.gov/publications/2003_Intro_BrownAct.pdf). That statute defines, as a species of subordinate body that is also bound by the open meeting requirements as a “legislative body”, a “committee, board, or other body of a local agency . . . created by . . . resolution, or formal action of a legislative body. However, advisory committees, composed solely of the members of the legislative body that are less than a quorum of the legislative body are not legislative bodies, except that standing committees of a legislative body . . . which have a continuing subject matter jurisdiction . . .” are legislative bodies covered by the Act.
The facts that the police committee was created by the Board in a unanimous formal action, and that it is a standing committee given a continuing subject matter jurisdiction, are obvious as detailed in the “BART committee document” linked to your post.
Copyright 2009 San Francisco Examiner