The St. Helena City Council adopted a resolution allowing for full disclosure of agenda details for closed sessions. The Napa County District Attorney’s office charged in December that the council violated the open meeting Brown Act in failing to notify the public of items under discussion in a closed meeting on a flood control project. -DB
St. Helena Star
Thursday, January 15, 2009
By Jesse Duarte
ST. HELENA, Calif. – The City Council has adopted a new set of guidelines aimed at shedding more light on what happens during its closed session meetings.
Under a resolution adopted Tuesday, the council will:
• Allow for more disclosure and opportunity for public discussion of closed session items.
• Include more details on its agendas relating to closed session items.
• Mention during open session any matters that are anticipated to be on future closed session agendas, and determine if those talks can be held in public.
The discussion of future closed session items will become a regular agenda item at the end of each meeting.
Under the new policy, time-sensitive matters may be placed on a closed session agenda even if they haven’t been mentioned in a previous open session.
Mayor Del Britton wanted to go even further by requiring all closed session items to be disclosed in a previous open session. If a pressing matter comes up between meetings, the council should call a special open session to disclose it, he said.
But the rest of the council sided with Councilmember Eric Sklar, who said that would be too burdensome for council members, and would hamper their ability to respond quickly to pressing issues like litigation threats.
At a previous meeting the council discussed other options, including holding closed session at the end of their meetings rather than at the beginning. But the council decided that forcing consultants and attorneys to sit through an entire meeting would be too expensive.
The changes come in the wake of a December investigation by the Napa County District Attorney’s office which concluded the council inadvertently violated the state’s open meeting law, the Brown Act, when it approved a land swap to facilitate the flood control project.
Unlike the council’s 2008 agendas, the last two closed session agendas have listed the names of all the parties involved in ongoing litigation over the Sulphur Creek floodwall at Vineyard Valley Mobile Home Park.
Tuesday’s agenda was the most specific yet, with a line describing the purpose of the closed session discussion: To seek legal advice on the city’s final offer of compensation to the affected property owners.