Even though our BMC requires a Police Commission meeting in June, we didn’t get one last month.
Instead, the Commission itself voted to postpone their first meeting until July, apparently because they decided ahead of time like Sylvia Brown that the council members were all going to vote John Brady out.
When a number of people complained about this at a later council meeting, attorney Dennis Barlow claimed that the Brown Act made it perfectly allowable to “continue” a meeting this way, and that oral communications weren’t required for this very reason– they could get to it next time.
Interestingly, all of a sudden this week, Juli Scott admitted that it was wrong for the PD Commission to cancel oral communications last month the way they did.
We’re wondering now what it took for them to be so contrite and finally admit the error…?
By doing what they did last month, the city stumbled into a primo Brown Act violation. Brown only allows hearings to be continued, not meetings. Meetings can be adjourned until later, but that only happens when there’s not a quorum, in almost every case.
What the city did last month was just decide to cancel a legally stipulated PD meeting without any notice and after it had already begun. There was no emergency nature to this action, a quorum was already present and there was no prior noticing. Members of the public had arrived and were getting ready to speak out.
We suspect the city got hit with a Brown Act warning about this stunt, and that’s why they’ve finally acknowledged their wrongful action. If allowed to stand, such a cancellation could be done at any time by Burbank. Say a city council meeting looks like it might get a little hot with community comment, and they could just “postpone” it to another, safer time– and then call it all a simple “continuance.”
But that’s not the way it happens in Burbank, ever. And it’s not how it works in the law. We’re glad to see the city lawyers now realize that they were wrong (actually, we think they always did— watching Barlow stumble all over the word “continue” last month was hilarious.) But why did this evasive stunt ever happen in the first place?
** UPDATE **
Just want to stress, that after reviewing last month’s council meeting tape — where Barlow told Dr. Gordon that postponing or “continuing” the PD Commission meeting was perfectly OK, oral communications as well– we get a big kick that this is exactly the opposite of what Juli Scott told people this week!
Burbank, California 