All jurisdictions subject to the Brown Act (California open meetings law) have been violating the public notice provision of the act at every meeting since January 1, 2019. That's nearly five full years of meetings, thousands and thousands of meetings around the state, that have ignored the law that was passed in 2016.
The public notice provision is Government Code 54954.2.
It was amended to bring the notice into the 21st century for every jurisdiction that has a web site. That's counties, cities, special districts (including school and college districts), and other bodies that the legislature has deemed subject to the public notice provision, such as Proposition 39 citizen bond oversight committees.
As a result, the public, including those who might consider themselves activists, have been fighting a losing battle against local governments. Manually having to navigate a web site or using a bookmark to get to a page where agendas are found is repetitive. You might forget. You might miss something. It takes your time and mental energy.
Instead of running the gauntlet in getting to a local government agenda, reading through or searching each agenda for issues of interest (in other words wasting your valuable time), the amended law requires a "prominent, direct link to the current agenda" from the home page. Not only that, but the agenda itself must be "retrievable, downloadable, indexable, and electronically searchable by commonly used Internet search applications." In other words, all the public should need to do is set up an alert to get an e-mail when topic(s) of interest appear on newly posted agenda.
But, that's IF the jurisdiction follows the law.
In almost all cases, for the thousands of jurisdictions in California subject to the Brown Act, they do not. The degree to which it's not followed varies widely among jurisdictions. The one common end result, however, is that the agendas cannot be searched by popular search applications because the web site or the agenda management platform, or both, prevent the search engines from reading and indexing the agendas. It's been seven years since the law was enacted. It's willful.
Failure to comply with the amended section is a misdemeanor. So it's a crime that the district attorney could prosecute, if the district attorney were interested in public corruption. District attorneys often call it by the euphemism, "public integrity." At a minimum, a district attorney should notify every jurisdiction in county that it had better get its act together and comply with every element of the public notice requirement.
What are YOU going to do about it?
First, you have to read the law -- subdivision (a)(2) -- carefully. Read all of it, it's long. It's very technical, but it's not hard to understand what the legislature intended. Once you understand what the law requires, you have a basis for reviewing the jurisdiction's web site to determine in what ways the "current agenda" is difficult to find, i.e., more than one click away from the home page, and the several methods by which the search engines are being prevented from indexing the agenda.
Second, you should politely ask the jurisdiction why it is not complying with the public notice requirement.
Most will brush you off. They'll say it's easy to find the agenda when you go to the web site. They may even point out that they can do a search engine search that goes right to the page with agendas on it. That's not the point. The law requires very specific things to be implemented to fulfill the statutory requirement for public notice.
It also doesn't matter what "other ways" the public can find what the agendas. It only matters whether the public is given public notice in accordance with the law.
Whenever I talk to activists, the point I make is that if you can't get your local jurisdiction to comply with this basic requirement for public meetings, what makes you think you can get them to deal with much more difficult or controversial topics.
Five years without giving public notice in accordance with the law, is a pretty long time.
How many more years are you willing to waste your time and effort to monitor your issue?
They're laughing at you! They're non-compliance is willful. They know they can frustrate you. Eventually, you'll go away or burn out. They will remain.
Creating alerts that are effective is an art unto itself, but it is eminently doable.
Agenda Alert Tips:
- The goal of agenda alert is to make a direct hit on an actual agenda for the jurisdiction(s) that interests you.
- Alerts are not searches. Searches cover everything that already exists in a search engine database. Alerts are only for newly, first time indexed results.
- No single alert is likely to return everything you want. Depending on the functionality of the alert system, you might or might not be able to use complex boolean logic. Unless you're a pro at that, your best bet is to keep it simple and create multiple alerts rather than try to stuff everything into one.
- Always limit an agenda an agenda alert to a single domain. If you want to make alerts for several or many domains, create alerts for each one. If you try to make a universal alert, you are likely to get irrelevant results from all over the world. Most search engines, use the site: attribute to specify the domain.
- To limit an alert to an actual agenda, build it based on the template used by the jurisdiction. A posted agenda will have many words, phrases, and names that are unique to an agenda from the jurisdiction.
- Different search engines produce different overall results. However, for an alert, if the search engine is allowed to index the agenda, you are likely to get the same alerts across different search engines.
- Test using recent agendas to see if the search criteria produces the expected results.
- Search engines are huge systems. They are constantly looking for new material to index. New is typically defined as a URL that is not already in the search database. If the URL for new agendas is always identical, it may index less frequently. No jurisdiction should be using the same URL for multiple agendas.
- Test the alert as a search. However, to better simulate what an alert would trigger on, you should add a time element, such as a year, a month and year, or full date. Examine the agenda template (the part that doesn't change from agenda to agenda) to see how dates are displayed.
- Remember that the jurisdiction has a significant impact on the search results. The jurisdiction can block all searches, block some search engines, or have a system that is incapable of being indexed at all.
Don't get discouraged by the effort needed to develop alerts. Once you've got one working well, you have a template for others. Over the long haul, the alerts will save you much more time.
Example Search Alert:
site:rivco.org +agenda +measure +election
site:rivcocob.org +agenda +measure +election
site:riversidecountyca.iqm2.com +agenda +meeting +measure +election
Let me know whenever an agenda for Riverside County has all the words (agenda, measure, and election) on it.
For the same reason that search engines are unable to index the material, it is almost certain that archive.org (The Wayback Machine) will be unable to make a permanent copy of a page for its archive.
Note Riverside County agendas are not placed on the county's home page (rivco.org). They are linked to from the clerk of the board's web site (rivcocob.org), but not physically located their. They aee in fact on a third-party platform (riversidecountyca.iqm2.com). Most jurisdictions are not this complex, but for any jurisdiction that uses an agenda management platform, the actual agendas, if they exist at all, will not be on the jurisdiction's web site. Setting up alerts that will get what you want requires some knowledge of where things are.
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