If you or a loved one are about to undergo surgery, you don’t want to learn right beforehand that the hospital administration can’t find personnel knowledgeable and skilled to perform the procedure and then sew you back up, so they’re bringing in a butcher and a seamstress instead.
But that’s exactly what most members of the Board of Supervisors want to be allowed to do when making appointments to public bodies and departments: pick people not fully qualified. So they’ve put an enabling charter amendment, Proposition A, on the local ballot.
The measure would weaken to “desirable” from mandatory the criteria to serve on the various bodies and in the departments, and it deserves the voters’ rejection.
Journalists and others to whom government transparency is essential oppose Proposition A because one of the bodies it would affect is the city’s open-government watchdog panel, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, whose job is to encourage and monitor city officials’ and agencies’ compliance with local and state open-meeting and public-record laws, especially the city Sunshine Ordinance. The lowering of criteria would apply to seven of the task force’s 11 seats, making it easier for the supervisors to stack it with people who have little or no knowledge of those laws and how to hold accountable city personnel and agencies who violate them.
While journalistic ethics usually dictates neutrality on political matters, we should and do take sides on issues whose outcomes affect our ability to do our job. Government transparency is one such issue. The Pacific Media Workers Guild (The NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America Local 39521), most of whose members are journalists, is among several organizations fighting attempts to reduce that transparency and, as such, opposing Proposition A.
Other such groups include the League of Women Voters of San Francisco, the San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters and San Franciscans for Sunshine.
All members of the public stand to lose if Proposition A passes. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force serves free of charge as a people’s court, enabling people to seek redress for transparency law violations, especially illegal withholding or redacting of public records, without having to sue. If they can no longer rely on the task force to bring remedy, people will indeed turn to the courts. That could cost the city millions every year. So could the increase in backroom dealing that an enfeebled task force would enable.
Government transparency is a pillar of democracy. That’s another compelling reason to reject Proposition A.
Richard A. Knee is a freelance journalist, and former member and chair of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.
