A legal battle over how the City of Fresno negotiates its annual budget has ended, largely, with a victory for city leaders.
Fresno County Superior Court Judge Robert Whalen ruled on Monday that the city will not need to provide an unconditional commitment that it will not violate the Brown Act in the future since it has already stopped forming budget subcommittees.
The backstory: The Fresno City Council used a budget subcommittee for several years to directly handle narrow budget issues with the Mayor and the city administration without having those discussions during a regular publicly noticed Council meeting.
- The subcommittee initially started with former Council members Esmeralda Soria, Luis Chavez and Paul Caprioglio in 2018 to specifically deal with sales tax revenue and general fund reserve revenue.
- In January 2023, the City Council approved the list of committees on its consent calendar and included documentation recommending that the budget subcommittee be made a standing committee.
- But the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California sent a cease and desist letter to the city demanding that the Council stop allowing the budget committee to operate behind closed doors in violation of the Brown Act.
- The ACLU also demanded the city make an unconditional commitment to refrain from keeping the committee closed to the public and to conduct all future budget committee meetings in accordance with the Brown Act.
- The City responded at the time that it would not make an unconditional commitment and identified the committee as an ad hoc committee, not a standing committee.
Whalen’s ruling: Whalen found that the city did not meet Brown Act requirements by not posting the agenda of the budget committee, nor making it open to the public and preparing meeting minutes.
- Whalen ruled the subcommittee was a standing committee even without the action of the Council in January 2023, making it subject to the Brown Act for the six years it was in existence.
- But he ruled that since the city has not had a budget subcommittee since the ACLU’s cease and desist letter, it is unnecessary to mandate the city to provide an unconditional commitment that it will not violate the Brown Act in the future.
What they’re saying: Fresno City Attorney Andrew Janz said in a statement that the ruling makes it clear that the Mayor is permitted to seek advice from any Council members as long as there is less than a quorum present – which, functionally, could be solicited in a slightly altered version from the now-disbanded budget subcommittee.
- Janz also called the ruling a win for the city.
- “As we have been saying all along, the City of Fresno maintains one of the most transparent budget processes in the State of California,” Janz said. “It is unfortunate that some chose to ignore the difference between strong-mayor forms of government and council-manager types of government thereby creating a false narrative of non-transparency and wrongdoing.”
- Janz said the City Council will decide whether it will appeal the part of the ruling that stated the committee was formed in 2023.
- “Instead of fixing potholes and hiring more firefighters to keep Fresno’s working families safe, the City has had to waste precious taxpayer dollars defending a nonsense lawsuit,” said Councilman Mike Karbassi. “All this just because disinformation agents don’t understand the fundamental difference between a strong mayor versus a council form of government. This has done irreparable harm and created an unwarranted schism of distrust between the public and their city. In the ultimate irony, this local propaganda site that likes to cast stones at the City, still refuses to regularly disclose its financial backers out of fear their destructive agenda will finally be exposed.”
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