Freelance journalist and Malibu resident Hans Laetz at Monday’s City Council meeting accused the municipal leaders of having violated the Ralph M. Brown Act, the state’s open-meeting law for local governments, when it allowed a group of lawyers to work on drafting a paparazzi ordinance proposal behind closed doors. Laetz also wrote a letter to this newspaper after the meeting saying he is considering filing a lawsuit.
Several council members and City Attorney Christi Hogin rejected the allegation from Laetz, saying a formal committee was never created and it was the First Amendment right of Mayor Pamela Conley Ulich, who is a lawyer and has met with the group that includes Pepperdine School of Law Dean Ken Starr, to speak with whomever she wants.
However, the council unanimously voted to accept Hogin’s recommendation to alter the wording of the minutes of the April 30 quarterly review meeting when the council supported the formation of the lawyer group so it would reflect what Hogin said was the actual intention of the council.
“None of you were expecting that a committee was being formed and there would be appointments to the committee, or even necessarily that an ordinance would come back,” Hogin said.
The Brown Act requires government and other bodies such as a City Council and commissions to follow several open-meeting rules, including that the schedule of meetings be released to the public and that anybody can attend them. The city attorney said the lawyer group is not a Brown Act committee because such committees can only be formed with a “formal action,” which she said was not made because no vote was taken. The lawyer group was created through a general consensus of the council following a suggestion by Conley Ulich.
Laetz called Hogin’s comments “the biggest tap dance I’ve heard from a lawyer in a long time.”
“The city attorney has once again given you terrible Brown Act advice. Eight words come to mind, ladies and gentlemen: Trancas Property Owners Association versus city of Malibu,” said Laetz, referring to a Brown Act case the city of Malibu lost in 2005 at the Court of Appeal. “Once again the City Council risks turning a simple series of bad legal advice and small mistakes into a colossal act of very bad faith.”
Laetz is a third-year student at Ventura College of Law. He has previously written for this newspaper and currently writes for the Malibu Surfside News, among other publications. He did not elaborate on his future plans during the meeting. He refused to answer questions from The Malibu Times following the meeting. However, Friday Laetz told The Malibu Times that he was considering suing the city, and he wrote a letter to the newspaper on Tuesday, also stating that consideration.
The council members who responded to Laetz had a different take on the existence of the lawyer group. They said it was a case of Conley Ulich meeting with a group of people to discuss a city issue, something that is legal as long as less than half the council attends the meeting.
“When I was elected to the council, I didn’t leave my freedom of speech at the door,” Mayor Pro Tem Andy Stern said. “I or the mayor, or anyone of us, will meet any damn time we want to with anyone. And we don’t need the authority of this council to do it. And that’s what the mayor did.”
Councilmember John Sibert added, “None of us intended to have a law written by a group of law professors … and Ken Starr is not my choice of someone to write laws here in Malibu. But going to him for an opinion on constitutional law really makes sense.”
Sibert said any proposal that would come out of the lawyer group “would go through a thoroughly vetted process that everyone will have plenty of time to comment on, [and] that will be voted on.”
This issue was added to the council agenda late last week following a series of heated e-mail exchanges between Laetz and city officials. The exchange was initiated by Laetz, who first addressed an e-mail to Conley Ulich and sent it to several people, including other city officials and members of the local media. Laetz, Hogin and Conley Ulich, who is an attorney, wrote most of the e-mail exchanges regarding the issue.
Conley Ulich met at City Hall on Friday with Laetz along with a reporter from The Malibu Times and the paper’s publisher, Arnold G. York. During the meeting, Laetz accused Conley Ulich of having “committed a crime” among other allegations. York asked for Conley Ulich to make all future meetings on a possible paparazzi law public, something Conley Ulich agreed to do.
At Monday’s meeting, Conley Ulich announced she would be meeting at Los Angeles City Hall on Thursday for a meeting of a task force on paparazzi formed by Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine. She said a Malibu taskforce would then meet at Malibu City Hall on Friday, and invited the public to attend.