BROWN AMENDS BROWN ACT
Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill (AB 246) into law on Monday that will put him on a list of officials allowed to meet in private to discuss “public security issues.” The bill amends the Ralph M. Brown Act, California’s open government law, that requires all matters of general importance to the public to be discussed in a public setting with certain exceptions (that you can find enumerated here).
In 2011, the LA County Board of Supervisors were caught having private meetings with the governor to discuss realignment, in direct violation of the Brown Act. While those meetings would still be unlawful under the new bill, which, by the way, was requested by the Supes, there is concern that the bill might still lead to questionable closed-door meetings.
The San Jose Mercury’s Josh Richman has the story. Here’s a clip:
Brown on Monday signed AB 246 by Assemblyman Steven Bradford, D-Inglewood, adding the governor to a list of those with whom city and county leaders can meet in secret to discuss “public security issues” under the state’s Ralph M. Brown Act public-meetings law.
“The Brown Act recognizes the need for elected bodies to meet in closed session on matters affecting public security,” Westrup said late Monday afternoon. The bill ensures the same provisions for the governor that already apply to the attorney general, district attorneys, police chiefs, sheriffs and security consultants, he said.
The Assembly passed the bill 69-5 in April, and the state Senate passed it 32-4 early this month. Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo, was one of the few to oppose it.
“The governor should have to follow the Brown Act just like anybody else,” she said Monday. “I think it potentially opens the door to making a deal behind closed doors when the discussion should be in public.”
Los Angeles County sought this bill after its supervisors met with Brown behind closed doors in 2011 to discuss his prison realignment plan, in which low-level offenders are kept in county jails instead of state prisons. Realignment was and still is controversial, yet Brown’s meetings with local officials can now be held out of the public’s view if they’re said to involve matters “posing a threat to the security of public buildings, a threat to the security of essential public services, including water, drinking water, wastewater treatment, natural gas service and electric service, or a threat to the public’s right of access to public services or public facilities.”
CONCERNS OVER THE CURRENT STATE OF LA FOSTER CARE
LA Times’ Jim Newton has an outstanding column this week on the chronic dysfunction that plagues the Dependency Court and the Department of Children and Family Services. The column seems to have come out of conversations Newton had with Judge Michael Nash, the presiding Judge of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, who has grown discouraged with the state of foster care in LA. Here are some clips:
The source of Nash’s discontent is the swelling caseload that his judges are being asked to carry — a burden that reduces the amount of time they have to focus on the needs of the children whose futures they decide. As of today, he said, each of the court’s 20 full-time judges handles roughly 1,350 cases at any given time, well above the recommended maximum. Often, matters of grave consequence must be heard and decided in minutes, even when they call for careful deliberation.
A typical day’s calendar for a Dependency Court judge might include deciding how much and what type of medication to authorize for a child; whether to remove children from homes after allegations of neglect or abuse; and whether to place them in the hands of strangers or relatives, or return them to shaky parents.
What especially infuriates Nash is that budget cuts are only part of the problem. In his view, too many social workers at the county’s Department of Children and Family Services are failing to exercise smart judgment about when to leave children with their parents and when to remove them from their homes. Instead, he says, often out of fear of being second-guessed, social workers remove children, disrupting young lives and burdening the courts.
That enrages Nash. Social workers who remove children to protect themselves from criticism, he said, are guilty of “following up bad social work with more bad social work…. That is unacceptable.”
(Read the rest—it’s a well-thought out piece on an incredibly serious issue.)
LA SUPES TO VOTE ON FOSTER CARE OVERSIGHT
Just a reminder: the LA County Board of Supervisors is expected to vote today on establishing a Blue Ribbon Commission on Child Protection to bring an independent review to LA’s foster care system (and to hopefully facilitate some much-needed reform).
Check back tomorrow for more on the Supes meeting and the voting results.
SCOTUS SENDS AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BACK TO LOWER COURTS FOR MORE REVIEW
In a 7-1 ruling Monday, the Supreme Court bypassed an expected blanket ruling that could have struck down affirmative action by sending the case back to the lower courts for more thorough review, while directing the federal appeals court to use a more exacting legal standard.
New York Times’ Adam Liptak has the story (and a neat video on the history of affirmative action in the US narrated by NYT’s Sam Tanenhaus). Here are some clips from Liptak’s story regarding the majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy:
Colleges and universities, Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority, must demonstrate that “available, workable race-neutral alternatives do not suffice” before taking account of race in admissions decisions.
[SNIP]“Strict scrutiny,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “does not permit a court to accept a school’s assertion that its admissions process uses race in a permissible way without closely examining how the process works in practice.”
Courts reviewing affirmative action programs must, he wrote, “verify that it is necessary for a university to use race to achieve the educational benefits of diversity.” That requires, he said, “a careful judicial inquiry into whether a university could achieve sufficient diversity without using racial classifications.”
Justice Ginsburg, who announced her dissent from the bench, said the race-neutral part of the Texas program worked only because of “de facto racial segregation in Texas’ neighborhoods and schools.”
(No, SCOTUS didn’t rule on the anxiously awaited Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) or Prop 8 cases, but rulings are expected by Wednesday or Thursday.)
(Photo courtesy of Phil Konstantin.)