Terry Francke, the Voice of OC’s consultant on government access, comments on the brewing situation in Westminster over probable violations of the Brown Act by three City Council members who comprise a majority on the council. As I wrote about previously, the advocacy group Californians Aware has submitted a letter to the city demanding that they correct an action that the majority executed outside the regular public meeting process.
When three members of the Westminster City Council released a press statement to at least two Vietnamese language newspapers announcing their consensus that a certain day of historic observance keenly felt in the community — commemorating the fall of Saigon in 1975 — needed to include all concerned ethnic organizations, not just those who had obtained a permit months earlier to conduct a ceremony at the city war memorial, and when whatever discussion the three had on the matter had not been at a public meeting, people noticed.
The existing permit was in effect challenged by a permit application seeking the same date and time at the memorial — an application then on the posted agenda for the next council meeting.
Then when these council members, at that official meeting, shifted the time at the memorial assigned to the original group to a less preferable hour, and awarded the permit for that preferred time to the new applicants, people were entitled to conclude that this shift had been decided in advance by the majority behind the scenes.
Read the complete post by Terry Francke here: The Case of the Curious Letters in Westminster.