Local riders alliance calls for more transparency
The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority Board of Directors will consider a “sunshine ordinance” from a riders union that claims the board violated the state’s open government act, but one director says it’s ironic to accuse him of violating the law when he was trying to include the public, not shutter it.
The Brown Act forbids representative bodies from discussing items at length that do not appear on a particular session’s agenda. So when BayRail Alliance Executive Director Margaret Okuzumi noticed the VTA board talking about representation and re-organization during Chairperson Lis Kniss’ verbal reports Feb. 7, the watchdog took a double-take.
“The (Governance Committee Recommendation) was not on the paper agenda distributed at the meeting, nor do I recall it being on the electronic agenda on the VTA’s Web site that I viewed just prior to leaving my house,” Okuzumi wrote Feb. 13 in an e-mail to VTA Board General Counsel Suzanne Gifford. “Some time later the item appeared on the Web site, and it appears the electronic agenda was modified retroactively to show that the item was on the (initial) agenda.” The recommendation, dated January 2008, does, in fact, appear on the Feb. 7 agenda online at www.vta.org.
But Director Greg Sellers – a 10-year Morgan Hill councilman who has also represented Gilroy and Milpitas on the regional VTA Board since 2006 – said Okuzumi misinterpreted his actions Feb. 7 when he used Kniss’ window to update the body on his activities as its sole representative on the Governance Committee. The committee is working with VTA staff and consultants to consider governance-related ideas, and Sellers said Monday he hoped to vote on the issue this month because his seat technically belongs to Gilroy now, but he needs more time for public outreach, so Gilroy has obliged him.
“The whole point of the Brown Act is to ensure an open, public way of doing things, so talking about how public we’ll be over a three month period is far form a violation of the Brown Act: It’s embracing the spirit of the Brown Act,” said Sellers, a grad student of public policy and ethics. “If there was a transgression, it was probably talking a little more about the (recommendations), but the main topic was how much public outreach we’ll be doing.”
The recommendations, which will be discussed at the board’s next meeting April 3, seek to deter high turnover rates by possibly lengthening the board’s five directors’ terms beyond two years and emphasizing a region’s geography over population. This could entail splitting “North County’s” three seats between two new regions and then creating a “South County” seat to encompass Gilroy, Morgan Hill and San Martin, which is seeking municipal incorporation.
Along with three other board members, Sellers discussed these restructuring ideas Feb. 7, but Okuzumi said the restructuring proposal was circulated without an agenda number printed on it. Hence the retroactive agenda modification, she wrote.
In a reply e-mail, Board Secretary Maria Marinos told Okuzumi that “the remedy is to have the item agendized” for the March 6 meeting. While it was not placed on the agenda, VTA Riders Union Founder Eugene Bradley presented the separate riders group’s sunshine law that evening anyway, after which San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed asked staff to draft a response.
Marinos went on in her e-mail to Okuzumi that she wanted “to assure (Okuzumi) that we take the provisions of the Brown Act very seriously and staff will be more diligent in the future in monitoring Board discussion and action to ensure compliance.”
The sunshine law proposes the following: VTA should advertise all meetings 10 days in advance, not just those about fare or service adjustments; closed sessions should be taped for eventual public review; and VTA records and e-mails should be public.
