County Cleared of Open Meeting Violation Claim

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office announced its conclusion Tuesday that county supervisors did not violate California’s open meeting law when they met in closed session late last year and directed their attorney to scuttle a union’s proposed ballot initiative.

In a letter to the Board of Supervisors dated Monday, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said that his office would not file a criminal or civil complaint over the matter. “This wasn’t even a close call,” Cooley said in an interview Tuesday.

He appeared before the supervisors to ask them to refrain from cutting his budget by $8 million.

At issue in the probe was a measure to raise the hourly wages of home health workers from $6.75 to $11.50. With Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky dissenting, the Board of Supervisors on Dec. 18 directed its attorney, County Counsel Lloyd W. Pellman, not to place the measure on the ballot.

The next day, Pellman called a majority of supervisors to tell them he concluded he could not block the initiative. Supervisor Gloria Molina then accused him of violating the Ralph M. Brown Act, and the board discussed the matter twice more behind closed doors before accidentally sending its minutes to The Times. The Brown Act mandates that elected officials discuss matters before the public in almost all circumstances.

The union representing the home health workers, Service Employees International Union, Local 434B, asked the district attorney’s office to investigate the board’s actions. In response to prosecutors’ decision not to file charges, the head of Local 434B issued a general statement saying the union remained committed to providing senior citizens and disabled people with quality health care.

Supervisors cheered the findings. “From the beginning, I felt we had done nothing illegal or criminally wrong,” Supervisor Don Knabe said. “If anyone violated the Brown Act, it was Pellman.”

Molina agreed, saying that her earlier assertion that Pellman had violated the Brown Act did not mean prosecutors needed to get involved. “I don’t think it [had] any criminal intentions,” Molina said, adding that supervisors have since passed new policies that would prevent similar violations.

The initial discussion among supervisors was on Dec. 18. Their public agenda announced that they would privately discuss “initiation of litigation.” But supervisors ended up directing Pellman to block the ballot measure in order to get sued.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Chasworth wrote in a formal rejection notice that “this action and the attendant discussion were reasonably related to the stated agenda description and thus “lawful.”

Terry Francke, an attorney with the California First Amendment Coalition, said he was alarmed at that conclusion. “That seems to me to be both disappointing and perverse,” he said. “It seems to be saying that a body can secretly authorize action invading the rights of others in order to provoke litigation that is helpful to some arm of government.”

Prosecutors said they also concluded that Pellman was not trying to poll votes when he contacted supervisors the next day, but he was informing them of his decision to certify the initiative. They concluded the subsequent closed session discussions were also legal.

David Demerjian, the head of the district attorney’s public integrity unit, said prosecutors relied on minutes of the closed meetings, memos between supervisors’ offices and other correspondence in their probe. He said they also interviewed Pellman.

In his letter to supervisors, Cooley praised the board for taking reforms last month “that go beyond the norm to assure Brown Act compliance.” Supervisors then agreed to post agendas and open to the public meetings of their deputies--which the state attorney general has already decided should be open meetings--and tape-record closed-session meetings, among other steps.

Cooley, who as district attorney has also pursued the Los Angeles school board for Brown Act violations, bristled at suggestions that he may go easier on supervisors, who control his budget. “There is not one scintilla of politics in this,” he said. “It is 100% fact-based.”

The Times has sued the board for allegedly violating the Brown Act. Susan Seager, the attorney handling that case, in a written statement disagreed with the district attorney’s findings and called upon him to disclose the information he used in his investigation “so that the public can scrutinize for itself the board’s conduct in this matter.”

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Times staff writer Garrett Therolf contributed to this report.