California Democrat legislators are exempt from state laws

(San Francisco Chronicle)  -  The state Legislature’s exemption of its own employees from a 1999 law intended to protect the jobs of whistle-blowers has garnered attention in recent weeks, as women complaining of pervasive sexual harassment in the state Capitol publicly call for such protections for legislative employees. But the whistle-blower act isn’t the only area of the law in which the Legislature has demonstrated a “do as I say, not as I do” mentality.

Take access to public records. Want to know whom government officials are meeting with, talking to or emailing? Or how officials were disciplined after an investigation found them culpable of wrongdoing? State agencies and local governments must release such information — calendars, emails and disciplinary records — under the California Public Records Act, which the Legislature created in 1968. But the same information is nearly impossible to get from state lawmakers, because the Public Records Act does not apply to the Legislature.

Instead, lawmakers are covered by the Legislative Open Records Act, which they passed in 1975 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The act that applies to them is riddled with exceptions, effectively keeping secret many documents that other branches of government must disclose.

“The Legislature has created in many areas a black box where the public can’t see records it would be entitled to see if the public officials at issue weren’t in the Legislature,” said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit organization advocating government transparency.

The Legislature’s open records law allows it to withhold investigations of wrongdoing, even when they led to disciplinary action. It also keeps secret correspondence by lawmakers and their staff, as well as officials’ calendars. The Legislature even refused to give reporters the calendars of two senators undergoing federal prosecution on corruption charges until media companies sued and won a court order compelling their release.

As more government agencies began storing information electronically, the Legislature updated the Public Records Act in 2000 to compel disclosure of digital records. Now state agencies and local governments must provide public records in any format in which they exist. That gives the public access to electronic records, such as databases, in their original digital format.

But the Legislature has never made the same update to its own open records act. “It was a nonstarter,” former Assemblyman Kevin Shelley of San Francisco told the Sacramento Bee in 2015.

Then there’s the open meetings law. The idea that government meetings should be open to the public has been enshrined in California law for more than 60 years. In 1953, the Legislature passed the open meeting law that applies to local governments, and in 1967 it passed a similar one for state agencies. Yet the 1973 law it passed requiring open meetings of the Legislature does not follow the same rules.

One major difference: It allows legislators to gather secretly in partisan caucuses. When issues hit the floor of the Assembly or the Senate, it’s common for one political party or the other to pause proceedings and call for a caucus. Legislators file out of the chamber and into two private meeting rooms where Democrats and Republicans separately gather for conversations that exclude the public and the media. They can hash out disagreements or craft strategy behind closed doors, then return to the chamber to publicly cast their votes.

Local governments, such as city councils, cannot do this. 

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