By Julian Foley

Disregarding its earlier pledge to follow local open-government laws, the San Francisco Community College District Board of Trustees voted last week to adopt a handful of the provisions of the city's Sunshine Ordinance. The Community College Board has a miserable sunshine record (for years board members met in secret for dinner before each meeting). The Bay Guardian agreed to endorse the college's bond measure last fall only after board members and the chancellor promised to move toward putting the agency under the sunshine law.

Following deliberation by a college district advisory committee composed of the former and current chairs of the city's Sunshine Ordinance Task Force and various lawyers, the trustees agreed to improve the district's Web site, increase public awareness of meetings, train faculty about public access, create calendars, and compile data. But the recommendations are most notable for what was left out.

The advisory committee, chaired by Ronald Lee, general counsel to City College, vetoed a long list of the Sunshine Ordinance's most stringent provisions on the grounds that they were designed for the city of San Francisco and would present problems if applied to City College. Among them were requirements to disclose records of ongoing negotiations for large and sole-source contracts, records of contractors and grantees, quarterly reports by lobbyists, and terms of settlement agreements prior to College Board approval.

Sup. Aaron Peskin, who has been a strong supporter of the city's Sunshine Ordinance, said in response to the board's vote, "When it comes to sunshine, public education should really be held to the highest standard. If it's good enough for the city, it should be good enough for City College."

Committee members said they saw little need to go beyond existing federal and state openness laws. "We're fixing a problem that doesn't exist," said advisory committee member Joshua Weinstein, an attorney for the Judicial Council of California. "I don't think we need to go further, because there isn't a problem."

Other sunshine provisions were left out because the committee interpreted them as requiring changes in working conditions, and thus contract revisions, for the college's unions – opening up meetings that pertain to health and safety and disclosing records of employee misconduct, for example.

The college board also refused to record its closed-door meetings and retain those recordings for 10 years, as the city is now required to do, citing fears that participants would not be as candid.

"We're here to represent the public," said trustee Milton Marks III, who supported the recommendations but called them conservative. "It's a very difficult balancing act. I don't know if we should be quite as concerned about questions of candor."

Certain board members did also express concerns that the committee did not go far enough in redesigning several provisions of the ordinance to make them a better fit, rejecting them flat out instead.

"They took a hypertechnical approach," trustee Julio Ramos said. "They were looking at the letter of the law as opposed to the spirit of the law." Still, he said, "it's better than nothing."

In a last-minute amendment introduced by board vice president and trustee Johnnie Carter Jr., the board agreed to review the district's progress on the new policy after six months, but not necessarily to revisit the issues that were left unaddressed.

Since the vote, however, questions have arisen about the advisory committee itself that could reopen the discussion. Joshua Kolton, current chair of the city's Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, admitted to attending only the first of four advisory committee meetings, while Terry Francke, general counsel to the California First Amendment Coalition, attended none; both cited time conflicts as the reason. And although Francke was reminded of the meeting times, he doesn't recall having received the final recommendations for review and says his requests for progress reports along the way were ignored. Still, the two men's names appeared on the list of committee members.

Carter was appalled by the news. "If there is any question about [the committee] itself, if it was anything less than what was represented to us, that would be sufficient in my book to bring the issue back," he said.