City council to overhaul process for creating committees after Fresnoland investigation

The Fresno City Council is overhauling its process for creating committees, six months after a Fresnoland investigation revealed that the city failed to follow its own rules and procedures for several years. 

Up for approval Thursday is a new resolution that repeals and replaces the city’s procedures for establishing new boards, commissions and committees. The resolution is among 39 consent agenda items to be approved with a single council vote without public discussion.

The new proposal sets forth a resolution template for creating new committees, as well as an accompanying formation document, identical to the previous city council process.

However, exempt from the city’s rules for committees are “informal working groups,” and the proposal does not define or provide any details on how they would function. Additionally, “bodies created by a non-legislative body, such as the Mayor or individual Councilmember, are not subject to the Brown Act,” the resolution reads.

The resolution is co-sponsored by Council President Annalisa Perea and Council Vice President Mike Karbassi. Neither responded to several requests for comment.

It is unclear whether a working group could be made to deliberate on the annual city budget. 

In August, a Fresnoland investigation revealed that the Fresno City Council’s budget committee has negotiated the city budget with the mayor’s administration in meetings closed to the public every year for the last five years. 

Several legal experts told Fresnoland the annual budget committee meetings should be public, since its recurring meeting basis constitutes a standing committee that should be subject to California’s Brown Act, a state law that requires public transparency from local governments.

City Attorney Andrew Janz at the time pushed back against whether the Fresno City Council was violating California law, claiming the five-year-old budget committee was a temporary, or “ad-hoc,” body that is dissolved and recreated every year, and therefore exempt from California’s Brown Act. 

However, Fresnoland’s investigation also showed that the city does not have the documentation to prove Janz’s claims. The city was also missing necessary documents for six other city council committees last August as well. 

Additionally, a Fresnoland review of California’s 10 largest cities by population found that only Fresno claims a Brown Act exemption for its budget committee. Even other San Joaquin Valley cities like Bakersfield and Stockton keep their budget committees open to the public.

In November, the ACLU of Northern California and the First Amendment Coalition sued the City of Fresno over its “secret budget committee,” alleging its private meetings violated California law and that they should be open to the public. 

Additionally, two councilmembers — Garry Bredefeld and Miguel Arias — have both called for the budget committee’s private meetings to be open to the public. 

“I think anything that deals with public money should always be accessible and open to the public,” Bredefeld told Fresnoland in August. “If you’re meeting and discussing how a budget is going to be spent, the public has every right to know.”

Perea has also announced that the Fresno City Council will not be convening a budget committee this year, but she has yet to explain how the council will attempt to negotiate the budget with the mayor’s office, and whether that’ll be done by an informal working group, which is the main addition to the city’s procedures for creating committees.

The new proposal also requires the city clerk to work with the city attorney to determine whether a newly formed committee should be subject to California’s Brown Act and whether members should file Statements of Economic Interest — although that has been required since at least 2004. 

Additionally, the resolution requires Brown-Act-exempt committees to report results of its meetings publicly to the rest of the city council. It is unclear why the Fresno City Council refers to all its committees as subcommittees, as none of them are a subgroup of a parent committee.