During the Appearances Section of the 4 April 2006 Carmel-by-the-Sea City Council meeting, David Dilworth, Executive Director of Helping Our Peninsula's Environment (HOPE), stated:
"Good Evening. My name is David Dilworth, Executive Director of Helping Our Peninsula's Environment...We protect our environment and democracy of our Mounterey Peninsula.
We appreciate the discussion you had on the agenda item on Open Government at the last meeting that was prompted by the Grand Jury Report which criticized this Council and this Mayor. However, your draft responses did not reflect reality or the judgment of most people. That's up for debate. But there's one thing that's not up for debate. And first of all I'm going to bring this to your attention. The Education Code allows any member of the public to put an item on a school board agenda. This is the Section:
Ed. Code Sec. 35145.5
It is the intent of the Legislature that members of the public be able to place matters directly related to school district business on the agenda of school district governing board meetings.
That's exactly what the Grand Jury was asking you to do for the City Council, which you declined.
Here's the Finding related to it.
Grand Jury Finding 6:
All cities have a published procedure and a form for the public to place items on city council agendas.
The city's response was, 'The City agrees with this Finding.' That's bewildering because the Grand Jury was mistaken. Carmel has no procedure or form for a citizen to place an item on the agenda. Carmel has no law or ordinance enabling that. So that response to the Superior Court of Monterey County was patently false. I suggest you revise your remarks that were sent to the Grand Jury because we're certainly going to point it out to them in our response.
Now, I'm going to bring a little bit of irony or actually illustrate how uncooperative this City and this Council are to allowing public input. First of all, on this exact item for last month, there was no paper copy available for the public to read what you were discussing. It was available on your web site, but it was 9 megabytes. On a slow dial-up, which I have, it takes about an hour to get that document. That's unacceptable. That's hostility to the public. It may be an oversight, but we think that needs to be straightened out. Then, when we asked to have that item pulled from the consent agenda, it was put at the end of the meeting, hours after we were here. We had two other meetings to go to---Monterey City Council meeting and one of our own monthly meetings. So we couldn't even attend those.
Well, we do have an alternative. HOPE conducted a series of 20 questions for all the candidates. Here are the answers we got from the candidates running for council. We did not get any responses from Paula Hazdovac, Gerard Rose or Mayor McCloud. But we did get responses from Ryan and the gentleman, Bill Winfield.
The last bit of irony we wanted to bring to your attention was we asked this Council to put open government on your agenda. We asked you in February. We await seeing that occur.
Thank you."
Note: Links to HOPE's Open Meetings Violation Letters to Monterey County District Attorney regarding Mayor McCloud
http://www.1hope.org/mccloud.htm (Re: Carmel-by-the-Sea Council Violates Open Meeting Law (Brown Act) FIVE times)
http://www.1hope.org/mccloud2.htm (Re: Carmel Mayor McCloud Violates Open Meeting Law Again)
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