August 23, 2007

City council votes on three Sunshine recommendations

Requests more info on taping closed meetings

By Carol Rosen
Editor

While the San Jose City Council approved several recommendations for more visible government, the members were unhappy with a provision recommending audiotaping of closed-session meetings.

City staff presented a series of proposals, some identical to the Reed Reforms voted in earlier this year, giving all but one unanimous approval. The audio taping recommendation was unanimously sent back to the staff to establish criteria for the taping.

Early in the discussion, City Attorney Rick Doyle told council members that if they voted to tape the sessions, they must determine what could be done with them. And, Mayor Chuck Reed noted that these tapes don’t function as a piece of paper.

“There are worries about where they go and that the tapes may be tampered with by cutting and patching,” Reed said.

Three other area cities—Milpitas, San Francisco and Oakland—record closed-session meetings, but the tapes are not released. “Those cities won’t ever release the tapes,” Doyle said.

Councilmember Sam Liccardo also expressed concern. “If we start recording before there are rules in place, it could create problems…we need to have a clear sense of what we are doing first,” he said.

Councilmember Pete Constant also agreed and but went further. He suggested the council make the decision to tape and them develop a framework. Constant says he feels the public may have trust issues with closed-session meetings.

“We need to have a game plan first and then decide if we will report and develop a method for a developing framework and then implement” the taping, he said.

Concerns
Councilmember Judy Chirco said she was concerned about items that “we would never release such as labor negotiations or personnel matters. We can’t seriously list items that we can’t legally report. I see real flaws in this idea, and I’m not convinced that it adds value.”

Another of her concerns centered on strategies the council employs. “If such strategies became known we could hurt the city in the future,” she said.

She urged the staff to provide a cost/benefit analysis “that would give us more bang for the buck instead of putting the cart before the horse.”

Councilmember Dave Cortese then moved to defer the vote on recording until there is protocol or a process of certification. Constant asked to add a “friendly amendment” stating the council intends to tape once the protocol has been set.

Since Cortese declined to add the amendment, the council took it on separately and later voted it down 8-3 with Reed, Liccardo and Constant the only yes votes.

The Sunshine Task Force recommendations also included closed sessions and public information and outreach. Discussion on public meetings was deferred until September.

Among the recommendations the council did approve was the proposal to update calendars weekly, by noon on each Monday. Besides council members, the new rule applies to, among others, council members’ chiefs of staff, the city manager, redevelopment director, police and fire chiefs, chief development officer, city attorney, budget director and information technology director.

Some council members balked at the weekly updates, which currently are done quarterly. A task force member said that some members had suggested a daily update. “For true transparency, the general feeling was that in order to get a sense of how decisions are potentially being made, we want to know who was occupying council members’ time in the week leading up to a big decision,” said neighborhood leader and task force member David Zenker.

Other councilmembers balked fearing media probes into personal business. However, Constant explained that he sees the recommendation as accounting for his time to his 90,000-plus bosses not going into details.

Once the language was straightened out, council members unanimously passed the weekly calendar update. Another recommendation, asking for increased public outreach and information also passed unanimously.

Recreation
Several items on the agenda dealt with recreation including a pilot project with KaBOOM! to install playground equipment at Welch Park in District 8 and the aquatics master plan as well as unanimously approving Parkland Dedication and Park Impact Ordinances revising fees reflecting 2006 land values.

The KaBOOM! discussion lasted nearly an hour and covered such items as costs, indemnification and wood chips versus rubberized materials under the playground equipment.

“We asked the staff to go out and be creative and then we question them when they do exactly that,” said Councilmember Forrest Williams. “In terms of effort this is a great idea. There are a few things that should be modified and adjusted…If this was being done by the city alone, the cost would be more than $300,000 [instead of $115,000]. We are saving lots of money. Overall we will be saving money and meeting state requirements. It’s a pilot program; we can’t lose. It’s not in my district, but Santa Claus came. We should say ‘ho, ho, ho’ and get it done.”

After three public speakers noted the plusses, the council voted unanimously for the project.

Cynthya Bojorquez, deputy director for the city’s Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services Department, presented the 2007 aquatics master plan, which also received unanimous approval.

The discussion, however, was anything but smooth. Acknowledging that the master plan is quite thorough and that children need places like pools to play in during the summer, the lack of money in the budget to support building new pools was visible throughout the discussion as were questions dealing with the proximity of walkers to pools.

“I have to inject a does of reality into this discussion,” said Reed. “We have no room to build anything. It takes millions of dollars to build a new pool and we may not have enough money to clean our streets or build a new fire station. Let’s go back out to the community. We want to do this, but let’s not give people unreal expectations.”

Bojorquez and her staff worked with schools and are in the process of working with other schools to develop public/private cooperation for pool use. In addition, she said the plan is long term and that her group is focusing on pools already available in neighborhoods requesting them. A marketing program encouraged a number of swimmers to come to the neighborhood schools that were opened, such as Willow Glen Middle School, she said.

“We have a 2007 report that will be available in October that will show high customers satisfaction,” she said, “and we will reopen for the 2008 season.”

Williams questioned why Valley Christian School, in his district, was not being used. Bojorquez answered that fees for the pool complex were too high for the city. Whereupon Williams noted that part of the agreement allowing the school to be built on that hill was a commitment to allow the city use of the pool.