Monday night, the Malibu City Council voted 5-0 to “correct” its minutes and “clarify” that its intention was not to set up an official committee to solicit the advice of local law professor Kenneth Starr in forming a new ordinance to restrict the activity of journalists, including paparazzi, in the city.
This comes three months after the city’s authorized committee began its secret work, beyond the eyes of curious Malibu residents, in fashioning an ordinance that would likely duplicate and exceed existing criminal and civil laws, including the new California Paparazzi Act already signed by the governor.
The heart of the issue is a meeting that occurred in secret between two city council members and Judge Starr last spring, unannounced to the public, at which the city committee bounced around purported problems with paparazzi, and how Judge Starr would be able to fashion a new ordinance that would continue the Supreme Court’s trend of limiting free speech activities, such as in the infamous “Bong Hits For Jesus” case.
Judge Starr, as you know, was lead attorney in that case, where the Supreme Court reversed three decades of liberty for students and made a decision that, from a First Amendment perspective, is a regression.
The City Council thinks I’m a third-year law student out to make his name.
This 30-years-of-experience news reporter and editor sees a City Council that is unwilling to allow the public and press to watch as a law is made-exactly the type of abuse the Brown Act and Public Documents Act are designed to prevent.
The Malibu City Attorney has given terrible advice to the Mayor and Council. Her reading of the Open Meetings law ignores specific sections that extend its coverage to “one-person committees” set up by a legislatory [sic] body to handle specific subject matter.
The city attorney has also eviscerated the law intended to preserve the public’s right to observe and participate in lawmaking, by using such arguments as no formal action was taken because the committee was authorized by a consensus vote, or that no city staff was assigned to the committee, making it not official.
The Mayor has, with good intentions, repeatedly represented her work in the Paparazzi Ordinance issue as an official public task force, despite the fact that the council supposedly voted to the contrary. Even at the Monday meeting, she referred to a city task force and needed to be repeatedly corrected by her fellow council members that it was a private effort she was referring to.
As many of you know, I am a mid-career law student working part-time for three news organizations. The costs of preparing and pursuing a lawsuit, in time and money, are weighing on my mind as I determine the next step.
I am consulting with attorneys on the suit, and we’ll decide what to do this week.
Hans Laetz