COVID-19 Action Agenda: San Diego Water Authority keeps voting to limit transparency
COVID-19 Action Agenda: San Diego Water Authority keeps voting to limit transparency
To prevent injustice and incompetence by their government, the people must be seen and heard by their government. But the Authority isn't worried about that.
October 13, 2022
Time: 1:30 P.M.
Special Meeting of the Full Board of the San Diego County Water Authority (no committee meetings held on this day).
Under the authority of AB 361 (which modifies the way public meetings are held under the Brown Act—the State’s open meetings law—during the pandemic) the SDCWA Board of Directors will consider whether to continue virtual-only public meetings INSTEAD of in-person meetings.
Staff Recommendation: Continue holding virtual-only public meetings
Background to Agenda Item:
The ability of citizens to prevent or remedy injustices and errors of judgement by government institutions depends a lot on their ability to see and hear, and to be seen and heard by, their public officials at public meetings.
A public speaker at a meeting of the Municipal Water District of Southern California board meeting, Oct. 11, 2022. Virtual commentators can call in, but cannot be seen or make virtual presentations.
This IS a special meeting, even though it happens every month at every local legislative agency meeting in the state due to AB 361, because it will help determine how transparent future public meetings of San Diego County’s preeminent water district will be.
That process is a precursor to legislation (AB 2449) effective Jan. 1, 2023, that will gradually regress the format for local public meetings back to pre-pandemic transparency levels over the next five years, which in the case of many water districts would actually require walking backwards.
In March, 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a State of Emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That allowed public agencies like SDCWA to meet virtually INSTEAD of in-person despite the Brown Act in order to safely continue to hold public meetings during the pandemic.
That approach was codified by AB 361 in the summer of 2021. It expires on 2024, a year after AB 2449 goes into effect.
AB 361 requires public agencies that use the modified Brown Act procedures to recertify the procedure every 30 days in accordance to the bill’s specifications.
To do that there must be a declared COVID-19 emergency by the Governor or local health officials, and the public agency must determine by vote that “meeting in person would present imminent risks to the health or safety of attendees.”
Here is how many but not all SoCal water board meetings are held now, more or less, when invoking AB 361 (taken directly from the top of the meeting agenda posted for this Oct. 13 SDCWA Board of Directors meeting):
“Per Governor Newsom’s executive orders and state legislation. The below meeting will not be held in person but electronically. Directors will be provided electronic access information separately. The public may access the meeting electronically by going to this web link: https://www.sdcwa.org/meetings-and-documents
“Public comment may be submitted by either of these two methods:
“(1) Before the meeting, or before public comment closes at the meeting, submit your telephone number by e-mail to the clerk at MNELSON@SDCWA.ORG and the clerk will call you when the board is ready to hear your public comment; or
“(2) Before the meeting, or before public comment closes at the meeting, e-mail your comment to the Water Authority general counsel at DEDWARDS@SDCWA.ORG and it MAY [emphasis added] be read aloud at the public comment period (three-minute limit).”
The SDCWA staff report acknowledges that the COVID-19 death rate in California is falling, but the Governor’s state of emergency is still in effect and COVID-19 deaths are still occurring. Also, social distancing is still recommend by the CDC. Thus, AB 361’s prerequisite elements for virtual only meetings are still in effect, the report reasons.
The staff report implies but doesn’t actually state that the lives of board members, staff, and public citizens would be in peril from COVID-19 if in-person public meetings were allowed to continue.
Therefore, staff recommends continuing with virtual-only meetings for another 30 days (as it has done since the passage of AB 361 and will likely continue to do until 2024).
But if it chooses to, the SDCWA (and any other local legislative body in the state) could decide to allow in-person meetings once again AND continue an upgraded version its current teleconferencing/video and audio format that would bring water districts into a new and improved era of open-government, in the spirit of the Brown Act, with the latest 21st Century technology available—something that cities have been doing for decades.
The SDCWA’s 36 member-agencies, and in turn their ratepayers—who ultimately bear the brunt of its pass-along costs to those agencies— and rarely show up for meetings due to inconvenient scheduling and poor outreach by their local water agencies—might want to complain if they could about the way SDCWA holds its meetings.
Such as:
Since March 2020 board and committee meetings have been livestreamed but visuals contain presentations only and public officials cannot be seen, making it difficult to know who is talking and who is actually in attendance.
Public speakers (far and few between) are heard by telephone only and cannot make virtual presentations of their own.
In lieu of making public comments by phone, the public may send their comments by e-mail, but the board may or may not read those comments aloud.
Video archives of meetings are not offered to the public for viewing or downloading and must be requested through the Public Records Act before 30 days to make sure they haven’t been deleted—but the SDCWA does not inform the public of that.
Audio archives of standing committees are presented for easy download. However, the audio quality is sometimes bad and it’s often impossible to keep track of who is talking. Listeners can’t see the staff presentations as they were given at the meeting unless they find them in the agenda packet, a process that is confusing, inconvenient, and discourages transparency.
The distinction between full board meetings and committee meetings is blurred, confusing the public and always walking a thin line between violating and complying with the Brown Act (see “Action at Committee Meetings” at the top of each agenda).
The meeting calendar (the first thing the public sees when looking for scheduled meetings online) does not explain the hybrid nature of committee meetings. Public citizens who miss the fine print on the agenda are easily misled to believe that there is a clear distinction between committees and full board meetings.
Committees and full-board meetings are held at random times throughout one day a month, as if part of one big meeting, for the sole convenience of directors, making public participation inconvenient and confusing.
All major action agenda items, including yearly budgets, are actually decided on at the committee level on the same day once a month and then are rubber stamped at the end of the day by the full board without discussion, confusing members of the public who are used to the full legislative body robustly discussing public agenda items passed on from the committee level before a final vote, which typically happens at city council meetings.
Greater transparency, not less, would help eliminate the problems that come with SDCWA’s meetings. Some other water districts already have better meetings practices but still fail to encourage full utilization of available technology that would ensure greater transparency during a pandemic or normal times.
In that vein, the best public-meetings format I’ve seen yet is from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which as I write this article is allowing me to watch a contentious debate by its directors over who should be the next chairperson of the board.
MWD board of directors meeting, Oct. 11, 2022
MWD meetings have almost all the prerequisites for maximum public participation, such as :
Public citizens may watch all public meetings in-person or via live-stream video and those videos are promptly archived on the MWD website for easy access and downloading.
Public officials participating in-person or virtually can be seen and heard by the public attending either in-person or virtually.
Public speakers participating in-person (including audience members) can be seen and heard virtually (but members of the public participating from remote locations can only be heard and cannot make visual presentations).
Unfortunately, the MWD utilizes the same slight-of-hand and arguably illegal system of confusing committee meetings with full board meetings.
But no matter how good the technology is, it can’t match the power that in-person meetings give to public citizens trying to keep an eye on their public officials and be heard by them.
Sweetwater Authority recently began making virtual video recordings of meetings available for downloading from its website. Officials can be seen by members of the public who can make their comments heard but cannot be seen or make virtual presentations during their comment time. Members of the public cannot appear at meetings in person.
More than two years of political conflict over COVID-19 protocols has exhausted the will of public officials to enforce those protocols and the desire of many public citizens to comply. Yet, the pandemic remains fluid and its future still looks volatile.
But there are ways to deal with that reality without necessarily using it as an excuse for eliminating or preventing transparency in local government.
The City of Chula Vista, in San Diego County, for example, allows in-person city council meetings while recommending that participants wear masks (previously, both masks and social distancing were required).
Most people, including staff and city council members, ignore that advice just like they seem to have been doing for a long time in other public settings.
For those who are uneasy in that situation or can’t attend for other reasons, the city has live webcasting, which is good, but it’s accompanied by a terribly convoluted public comments format that allows remote viewers to leave written comments (if they can manage to follow the complicated instructions) that will not be read aloud at the meeting. Instead, a few minutes of time is given for council members to read the comments, but there’s no way of knowing if they do so.
Padre Dam Municipal Water District allows the public to see board members and staff, as public speakers attending meetings in person. Public speakers connecting virtually can be heard but not seen. Archived footage must be requested per a public records request, but may be deleted after 30 days.
Despite at least a year’s worth of public complaints, the city refuses to upgrade virtual comments to an audio or audio-visual format. But with enough public pressure by angry residents appearing in person at meetings, it could probably be persuaded to to do so.
Likewise, under Gov. Newsom’s ongoing emergency declaration, a local legislative body could require mask wearing and social distancing, as well as provide outside seating, if the public demanded it.
Or it could continue to ban in-person meetings, as the SDCWA board will almost certainly do this Thursday when few if any ratepayers will be watching. Then it could continue to otherwise hold its meetings as it did before the pandemic, with no effort to improve its virtual transparency.