By Matthew Hirsch

Following three tumultuous hearings at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors' Rules Committee, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force voted unanimously July 26 to withdraw its support from the Open Government Ordinance and ask Sup. Chris Daly to pull the proposal from consideration.

The Board of Supervisors was slated to vote on the ordinance July 27, after the Bay Guardian's press time, with just four votes needed to send it to the November ballot. Daly told us he would consider heeding the task force's request but hadn't yet committed to withdrawing the measure.

"Better to put to the voters a good package later than to put to the voters a bad package now," task force member Rick Knee said at the meeting.

The task force proposed the Open Government Ordinance in April as a way to close loopholes in the 10-year-old Sunshine Ordinance by expanding open-government laws to cover nonprofits and strengthen enforcement of the ordinance, among other changes. But the committee stripped those two provisions and added a few changes of its own.

Most significantly, the committee inserted a section into the ordinance that would allow the Board of Supervisors to change the sunshine laws in the future without voter approval. The Sunshine Ordinance can now only be amended at the ballot.

Other changes included moves by Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier to weaken a requirement for informal policy groups to post notices of their meetings, as most city commissions now have to do under the Sunshine Ordinance, and an attempt to ban campaign consultants and lobbyists from serving on the task force.

Alioto-Pier denied charges that the move was targeted at task force member Doug Comstock, who is a veteran consultant on many local campaigns and was likely to help with this fall's effort to win approval for the measure.

"We don't want people questioning the integrity of the Sunshine task force," Alioto-Pier told the Bay Guardian. "We want to make sure that they are representing everyone and not one particular interest."

Sup. Matt Gonzalez voiced efficient-government concerns about the ordinance. In an effort to preserve the current limit on public comment at the supervisors' weekly meetings to items not already heard in committee, Gonzalez moved to exempt those meetings from the minimum three minutes of public comment the ordinance would grant to any participant at a public meeting.

But task force members felt the Rules Committee co-opted a package that was the product of two years' worth of work, tweaking it in inappropriate ways that could damage current open-government standards.

Knee told us, "What the Rules Committee did was a slap in the face."

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