Change of heart
Returning from a week's absence, I had a message (not a massage) from the Pasadena City Attorney's office explaining new records were available per a request I'd made.
Weighing in at $35 in copying charges, the documents couldn't be the list of city-owned cell phones I'd requested -- and am still waiting on.
Turns out they're the same documents -- now in unredacted format -- that I wrote about on May 27. (Story posted after the jump as it's fallen, unlinkable, into the newspaper's pay-to-play archive. AKA "The Abyss.")
Have members of Pasadena's City Council -- who often strain to accommodate their most vocal citizens -- applied a double standard to the Northwest? Has developer Danny Bakewell fomented racial discord -- as he has been famously accused of in the past -- to game the system?
Although the stakeholders involved may largely fall down racial lines, reality is usually more complex than, well, black and white.
Despite reams of policy and plans general, development drives politics. Pick up any newspaper and read stories about buildings. Buildings and corruption.
Healthy, journalistic skepticism has no better application than where those two tangle: politicians and developers. Their symbiotic relationships come into conflict with an open, accountable and minimally corrupt Democracy.
So, apparently, the City Attorney's office reconsidered its position that it was not in the public interest to release the super-secret evaluation forms -- without names redacted -- of the special commission that reviewed four proposals for Heritage Square project.
Heritage Square is currently a square block o' blight at Fair Oaks and Orange Grove, technically owned by said public and worth $13.4 million.
Those evaluation forms served as the commission's vote, which has served as the basis for why the council should rubber stamp its recommendation to move forward with the Bakewell Company.
Which could very well be best-suited for the job.
But government isn't supposed to happen in secret. Does public scrutiny slow things down? Make government less "efficient?" More susceptible to lobbyists? Absolutely. But also slightly less susceptible to greed, mendacity and corruption? That's the idea.
Now if only Charlie Munger would buy the Star-News and hire 20 more reporters.
UPDATED: I received a June 4 letter with the phone list.
Heritage vote may be unlawful
Star-News (Pasadena, CA)
May 27, 2007
Author: Kenneth Todd Ruiz Staff Writer
PASADENA - Not only did it earn the ire of some community members - the city's process for awarding a multimillion-dollar redevelopment project may have been illegal under the state's open-meeting law.
In recent weeks, the City Council has been under pressure to enter negotiations with the developer recommended for Heritage Square by a special commission.
The body met, deliberated and voted in private - a process open-government experts said likely violated
state law.
"If the City Council, even with a nod and a wink, told the city manager this citizens group should be created, and then the city manager did that, then that would mean this body would be subject to the Brown Act," said Jim Ewert, a lawyer with the California Newspaper Publishers Association, referring to the Ralph M. Brown Act, the state's open-meeting law.
Creation of a Developer Selection Committee was authorized under a Request for Proposal approved by the City Council last year. Although its members and other parameters were organized by city staff, any entity created by a legislative body is subject to the Brown Act, according to Government Code.
There are few exceptions that permit the public's business to be conducted in private, such as specific personnel matters or delegated negotiations over terms and conditions of a pending land transaction.
John Kennedy, chairman of the 15-member Developer Selection Committee, said the group's deliberations were held in private only at the direction of city staff.
Despite that, he said, the commission opted to invite members of the public to offer input at the beginning of its March 31 meeting.
But holding the meetings in private did make sense for a fair process, he added.
"One of the practical reasons the meeting wasn't public was that it would have given one developer an advantage over the other in terms of hearing what the previous had presented," Kennedy said.
By a wide margin, that committee recommended the city negotiate with the Bakewell Company to build 2.2 acres of residential and commercial space along North Fair Oaks Avenue the city of Pasadena spent about $9 million to acquire.
A reappraisal of that land submitted to the city April 28 - but absent from the council's April 30 deliberations - pegged the land's current value at $13.4 million.
Some members of the Northwest community and the African-American community in Southern California berated the council for not heeding the committee's recommendation, accusing the normally constituent-friendly council of a double standard for the black community.
On the other side of that racial subtext, many also made clear their desire to see the project go to Bakewell solely because its chairman, Bradbury resident Danny Bakewell Sr., is African American.
After the other developer under consideration backed out, the council voted Monday to conduct a "pre-negotiation" exploration of Bakewell's proposal.
City staff members, on the defensive after some on the council all but accused them of impropriety, have resisted disclosing further information relating to that process, an effort that could also fall outside of the law.
Thursday afternoon, the city attorney's office released incomplete, redacted records from the selection committee's final March 31 meeting. Those records consist of the evaluation scoring sheets completed by each committee member and used as the basis for tabulating their collective vote.
The documents released Thursday had the committee members' names redacted.
City Attorney Michele Bagneris said that to identify how members voted would have a "chilling effect" on future public participation.
Ewert said that was a "ridiculous" assertion.
todd.ruiz@sgvn.com
(626) 578-6300, Ext. 4444
www.insidesocal.com/pasadenapolitics
UNDER THE DOME
|
| Pasadena -- news, politics and gossip. Send tips, rumors, rants to Dan Abendschein dan.abendschein@sgvn.com. |
2 Comments
Leave a comment