Tom Campbell and Elizabeth Patterson

By Nick Rahaim

› news@sfbg.com

In late 2001 the city of Benicia paid $50,000 to settle with attorney Michael H. Remy after Mayor Steve Messina barred him from speaking to the City Council.

"We had a bad history of not having a good open government," Tom Campbell, a former council member, told the Guardian.

Campbell and councilmember Elizabeth Patterson began working in 2003 to develop an open-government policy in Benicia. They helped create a Sunshine committee to draft an ordinance similar to ones in place in Oakland and San Francisco.

Among the proposals: allowing the public to speak at all city meetings and providing greater accessibility to all records, agendas, and minutes.

Patterson and Campbell both stressed that the ordinance was aimed not just at government procedure but also at ensuring that members of the public were aware of their rights.

At first the two activists thought it would be easy. Given the small size of the city and its government, Patterson and Campbell anticipated the ordinance would be finished and passed in a matter of months. Instead it took two years.

"People are in favor of open government just as long as it does not involve them," Campbell told us.

The Sunshine Committee faced the same problems that open-government forces have faced in other cities. For starters, they realized that a lot of public money goes to nonprofit organizations — but those groups don't want to be subjected to scrutiny.

The committee ultimately compromised with the nonprofits, including Benicia's Chamber of Commerce, agreeing that those groups would not have to disclose the specific allocation of funds within the organization.

The second obstacle was Mayor Messina. The Sunshine Committee wanted to create an independent agency, similar to San Francisco's Sunshine Task Force, to ensure that city officials followed the law. But Messina said that would only add another layer of bureaucracy to city government.

Patterson and Campbell wouldn't budge on that point. With guidance from Terry Francke, general counsel for Californians Aware and former counsel to the California First Amendment Coalition, they insisted that an independent commission was absolutely necessary. A sunshine ordinance "is only as good as its independent commission," Patterson told us.

The Sunshine Ordinance, which includes an independent oversight commission, finally passed on June 21, 2005, by a 4–1 vote. The lone dissenting vote came from Mayor Messina.

Campbell stressed the importance of both the public and elected officials continuing to work for greater openness in government, saying, "Nothing is etched in granite, it can change, and you can lose what you spent a long time working on really fast." *