Charge money to attend a City Council Meeting?

Would you pay $40 to hear your Mayor deliver the State of the City address?

He or she would have to be really entertaining wouldn’t they? Even then forty bucks … Nah.

According to the Modesto Bee such a plot was uncovered in Modesto.

Modesto leaders sent mixed messages this week about the mayor’s State of the City address, calling it a City Council meeting and then changing course to avoid breaking an open government law.

The state’s Ralph M. Brown Act prohibits city councils from charging admission to their meetings. But Modesto appeared to be doing just that when it called Mayor Jim Ridenour’s annual speech a City Council meeting.

Ridenour is delivering the speech at a Feb. 17 Chamber of Commerce luncheon that costs $40 to attend. Because the City Council is expected to attend, the city clerk sent out a public notice calling the event a council meeting and listing one agenda item: the State of the City speech.

That put the city on the wrong side of the Brown Act, which says it’s illegal for city councils to hold meetings in facilities that bar people on the basis of race, gender, religion or “where members of the public may not be present without making a payment or purchase.”

Brown Act expert Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said Modesto could avoid the violation if it let the public listen to the speech without paying the $40 lunch fee.

“While they can offer things there like lunch or coffee for a fee, the part that they can’t charge for is admission,” Scheer said. “That has to be permitted for free. This is either a situation where they are required literally to provide a free lunch or they have to have a mechanism where people can opt out of eating.”

Past State of the City speeches have been sparsely attended, aside from government employees, their families and a few business leaders. Organizers of this year’s event say they hope to bring the speech to a wider audience.

Let’s see … Sparsely attended in the past when the speeches were free and they hoped for a larger crowd by charging $40?

Even if this wasn’t illegal, the idea was ill conceived from the start.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 4:32 am and is filed under Government Meetings 101. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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