THE REFORMS THE Sunshine Ordinance Task Force proposed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in June were hardly radical. Most of the changes in the city's landmark open-government law were simple housekeeping measures designed to clear up some fuzzy language in the document. A few were significant changes – but they were badly needed and would have simply expanded what the voters intended when they passed the law as Proposition G in 1999.

And yet only one supervisor, Chris Daly, would agree to sponsor the legislation, and the members of the Rules Committee – Matt Gonzalez, Sophie Maxwell, and Michela Alioto-Pier – along with the City Attorney's Office, gave it a virulently hostile reception and gutted it so badly that the final product is almost worthless. At this point, Daly (who, along with aide Bill Barnes, deserve immense credit for taking on this fight) ought to withdraw the legislation so the task force can start over again and come back with a new proposal for the next ballot.

The main problem with the Sunshine Ordinance is, and always has been, enforcement. The task force was created to ensure city agencies obey the law, but it's never had the authority to force reluctant politicians and bureaucrats to hand over documents or open up secret meetings. The proposed amendments would have addressed that by giving the task force the power to subpoena witnesses and to hire outside counsel to take scofflaws to court.

The Rules Committee members insisted the task force needed no such special authority: they said the panel could simply go to the supervisors and ask to use the board's existing subpoena power and could use the existing process to ask the City Attorney's Office to approve outside counsel.

But the very fact that the committee members were so unwilling to accept these changes demonstrates why that process will never work. The task force has to be an independent agency, with independent authority.

All through the Rules Committee process, Gonzalez, Maxwell, and Alioto-Pier showed a consistent disdain for public process and open government. They repeatedly complained about a mild provision that would have required city boards and commissions to allow at least three minutes of testimony from each person speaking at a public hearing (Gonzalez said that was too long). They kept asking why these changes are even needed. Alioto-Pier pushed through a last-minute provision (without informing Daly or the task force members in advance of the hearing) that was obviously aimed at forcing Doug Comstock, one of the lead sponsors of the amendments, off the task force.

In the end, after the City Attorney's Office was done with it, almost everything of value – including the subpoena power and the outside counsel – had been stripped from the legislation. Instead, it has all sorts of problems, including a new provision that would allow the supervisors to amend the law at any time with a two-thirds vote (and it's obvious by the way the Rules Committee acted on this that the board can't be trusted to amend the sunshine law without a vote of the public).

Now that the supervisors have subverted an excellent piece of legislation, there's no point in going forward with a weak set of amendments that could do more harm than good. The task force should come up with a new set of proposals to strengthen its ability to do its job – and activists should be prepared next time around to take the battle directly to the ballot, bypassing the supervisors, so that a reasonable package of reforms can go forward without being hacked to pieces by politicians who don't want public accountability.