Private MTA Session May Have Violated Open Meetings Law

In a session that experts say appears to have violated the state’s open meetings law, 10 top Los Angeles transportation officials gathered privately last month in Mayor Richard Riordan’s office to discuss the future of the man who now heads the region’s problem-plagued rail project.

Under instructions from Riordan’s office, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials bypassed their normal procedures and did not put out a public notice that a committee of four MTA board members was meeting Dec. 22, Board Secretary Helen M. Bolen said in an interview.

The other board members were not formally notified about the committee meeting. But several heard about it and showed up to discuss hiring an outside consultant to assess the performance of the MTA’s embattled Chief Executive Officer Franklin E. White.

This created a quorum of the 13-member MTA board, which experts say required advance public notice of the hourlong meeting.

The mayor’s office said it had little involvement in organizing the meeting or putting out a notice about it, leaving that to the MTA.

Mayoral spokeswoman Jane Galbraith said the meeting was legally closed to the public because it involved White’s performance evaluation. “It was a personnel matter. Personnel matters are not public meetings. . . . It was a private meeting,” she said.

The unusual circumstances behind the meeting underscore the heightened tensions over White’s job status. The agency has withstood a recent series of financial and political setbacks over construction of its multibillion-dollar rail system, and White has become a magnet for criticism from Riordan and others.

As serious as questions about the MTA’s management have become, however, some people inside and outside of the agency say that a closed-door, unpublicized meeting is not the answer.

“What the hell is going on? Why do you have a meeting and not tell anybody?” asked MTA board member James Cragin, who heard secondhand about the meeting and decided to attend.

“I’ve always felt the public’s business should be public, period,” said Cragin. “I like Mayor Riordan, but I don’t know what he was thinking.”

Bolen, the board secretary, said Deputy Mayor Rae James instructed her to send advance notice of the meeting only to the four MTA members who serve on the CEO evaluation committee, and their alternates. Normally, everyone on the board would be informed of a committee meeting as a courtesy, and public notice would be given.

“This one was slightly different, but that’s what the instructions from the (committee) chairman were,” Bolen said, referring to Riordan’s office.

Riordan’s office said he and James would not be available to discuss the issue. Galbraith declined to discuss further details of the meeting. “That’s as far as we can divulge to you at this point,” she said.

After some MTA members outside the committee questioned why they weren’t notified, the mayor’s office told Bolen there must have been a misunderstanding about the instructions, Bolen said. But, she said in an interview, “I know what I heard.”

Several experts in open meeting regulations said the meeting appears to have violated state law.

The CEO committee itself may fall outside the open meetings laws, because the MTA considers the panel to be an ad-hoc and non-permanent group. But even so, the meeting appears to represent an unpublicized gathering of the full MTA board because a majority of the 13 directors were present.

Bolen said 10 board members and alternates attended the meeting, representing seven of the 13 seats on the board. Bolen was also there, taking minutes, as well as several staff aides.

“If a quorum was present . . . then it should have been treated as a special meeting of the board itself,” said Terry Francke, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition.

In such a case, he said, the public should have been notified of the meeting and agenda items should have been publicized, regardless of whether it was a closed personnel session.

No votes were taken at the meeting, participants said, but board members discussed at length the idea of bringing in the consulting firm of McKinsey & Co. to suggest how the board could best evaluate the work of its chief executive officer.

Riordan--who successfully pushed for the hiring of Arthur Andersen & Co. late last year to do a broader study on the MTA’s organization--was the chief backer of this latest idea, participants said. At the meeting, he introduced a representative from the McKinsey company, which board members said is offering to do the consulting work pro bono.

The mayor has said he wants to take a “very hard look” at how top MTA managers are performing, and associates say Riordan has already discussed the idea of firing White as CEO. Under the terms of White’s 1993 contract, his tenure will automatically be extended two years if he is still employed on April 1. White could not be reached for comment.

The state’s open meetings laws, commonly known as the Brown Act, were created more than four decades ago to open up the workings of government to the “sunshine” of public scrutiny. The MTA has its own policies for informing the public, and spokesman James Smart said the Dec. 22 meeting appears to have broken from past practice.

Committee members can go into closed session to discuss a personnel issue, but the public should still be told what is happening, Smart said. “This shouldn’t happen,” he said of the unpublicized meeting.