A former newspaper editor and publisher says ‘balderdash” to a city attorney’s justification in closing a crucial meeting on a 35-unit development in Livermore. -DB
Contra Costa Times
Commentary
June 7, 2009
By Tim Hunt
THE LIVERMORE City Council and its legal advisers have been playing fast and loose with the state’s open meeting act.
The council met in closed session on April 13 to discuss strategy for its hostile annexation of the Hilliker Place parcels off Las Positas Road and across from Wal-Mart and Home Depot.
The landowners and the city had been negotiating for a development plan for several years before the city decided to push ahead with annexing the land without an agreement in place.
While the general plan designation could allow up to 45 units on the 45 acre-space, there were issues about it being a scenic corridor. They finally agreed to a plan last month to allow 35 units — quite a bit more than some neighbors would have liked.
The open meeting law, the Ralph M. Brown Act, limits reasons why government entities can meet privately: pending litigation, personnel matters or land purchases being the primary reasons.
When Assistant City Attorney Judith Propp was asked how the council justified the closed session, she responded that her office and the council considered the meeting of the Local Agency Formation Commission as “quasi-judicial” and thus it qualified under the litigation exemption.
The polite response would be balderdash.
Isela Castaneda, an attorney with Holme Roberts & Owens, the general counsel for the California First Amendment Coalition, said to me via e-mail, “… it has long been held that LAFCOs are quasi-legislative agencies … and their proceedings are quasi-legislative (not quasi-judicial) in nature.”
She cited the appropriate cases and went on to write, “As one court of appeals noted: ‘An administrative agency such as LAFCO is nonetheless quasi-legislative in nature, though it holds public hearings and considers testimony presented by any affected local agency or county or any interested person who wishes to appear. (The) fact that in the subject proceedings (LAFCO) was not enacting ordinances embodying rules and regulations does not make its actions any less quasi-legislative. Nor does the presence of certain elements usually characteristic of the judicial process mean that (its) action was quasi-judicial.”
It’s abundantly clear that the City Council met inappropriately in closed session.
There was no question who was the favorite politician at Lawrence Livermore Lab when it dedicated the National Ignition Facility on May 29, the 12-year anniversary of the groundbreaking ceremony.
The event drew the governor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and three members of Congress, but it was Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, who received the loudest and longest ovation when she was introduced. She’s championed the Lab since she was elected in 1996 and built close relationships with its senior managers.
Director George Miller said that after he met Tauscher when she was a candidate, he went home and told his wife he’d found a candidate he could vote for. Even during the 2000 reapportionment that redrew congressional districts, she insisted she keep Livermore in her district, even as the boundaries were pushed north to make it a safe seat for a Democrat.
Tauscher tirelessly pushed the project, which had its tough times during the Clinton administration when it was revealed it would cost more than four times more than what Congress had been originally told. Miller took the NIF helm then and moved it forward to where it could actually come to fruition.
His leadership in that project, coupled with his career in senior management in the weapons program, resulted in his ascending to the director post when Mike Anastasio was tabbed to lead the University of California-Bechtel Corp. consortium bidding to manage the sister lab at Los Alamos, N.M.
The construction project is a stunning technical achievement that involved a number of pioneering technologies. Among the more staggering: the Space Shuttle has 2,000 control points that are computer-operated; NIF has 60,000 operated by software that has 2 million lines of code. The software is why it only takes 12 people to operate the laser.
Now comes the $4.5 billion question: Will the gigantic tool create the energy of the sun in its target chamber?
Tim Hunt is the principal with Hunt Enterprises, a communications and government affairs firm. He is the former editor and associate publisher of the Tri-Valley Herald.
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