Santa Ana City Council slams the door on open government again

When our former blogger Sean Mill wrote about how he was going to talk to Councilman Sal Tinajero about fashioning a Sunshine Act that would open up Santa Ana’s government, I was amazed and somewhat dubious. I just could not see Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido and his cabal actually voting to put all the Council meetings on T.V. and online in a searchable archive. Now we know it was all a bunch of B.S.

Pulido and company changed the agenda for Monday’s City Council meeting today, with a last minute 85A item that does NOT include any of the pipe dreams Sean wrote about over at Liberal OC. Nor does the item include televising the commission meetings. You may recall that Sean took Councilwoman Michele Martinez to task for not including that in her 85A item from few weeks ago. That was the item that NONE of the Council Members seconded.

So what did Pulido and his hacks come up with this time? Well, it is a vague and disappointing measure. All it says is:

Creation of ad hoc committee to review current council meeting structure. (Tinajero, Sarmiento and Alvarez).

Wow. The Santa Ana City Council has sentenced open government to death by committee. Even better, the committee includes the same Councilwoman Claudia Alvarez who famously said that the Council had already studied the issue of putting the Council meetings online for two years and they just could not come up with the technology to do this. Even though George Collins manages to do this from a laptop in his home office.

I hereby dub Tinajero, Sarmiento and Alvarez the Gang of Three. There is no way these anti-open government stiffs are going to do anything to open up our city government. They already had a chance to do so, and chose to remain silent.

I am told that one of the changes the Gang of Three hopes to institute is moving the public comments to the start of Council meetings. I really don’t like that. I like being able to address a specific item when it comes up on the agenda. And I like having a chance to berate Pulido and his cabal in the last public comments, at the end of the Council meetings. So if they do this I will encourage everyone to go to the Council meetings and turn in speaker request cards for EVERY SINGLE ITEM. That’s right…we will filibuster the Council meetings.

Seriously, this really is the worst City Council in all of Orange County and perhaps in all of Southern California. They can’t do the right thing to save their lives! What a joke. I feel bad for Sean. The Council has made him look like a complete joke with this move. He promised the stars and we ended up with a mud pie.

Vote no on Measure D. End the political career of Councilwoman Alvarez once and for all!


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"Admin" is just editors Vern Nelson, Greg Diamond, or Ryan Cantor sharing something that they mostly didn't write themselves, but think you should see. Before December 2010, "Admin" may have been former blog owner Art Pedroza.