UPDATE: The City Council postponed the discussion on the ballot summary to the May 29th Council meeting.

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Sometime Tuesday night — likely after 11 p.m. — the Council will vote on what appears to be the perfunctory task of certifying the Berkeley Sunshine Ordinance for the November ballot. But without your help the council will likely approve a ballot summary that will poison voters against the Berkeley Sunshine Ordinance.

Please sign this petition that we'll be presenting Tuesday night. We hope to have 1,000 signatures by the Council meeting. If you can make it, we'd love for you to speak out against the proposed summary as well.

Dear Mayor Bates and and the Berkeley City Council,

Agenda Item No. 38 on the May 15 calendar will certify the Berkeley Sunshine Ordinance. With all of the issues before the council, this may seem like an insignificant matter, but it is not.

Here is the language that is being proposed to be put on the ballot:

CITY OF BERKELEY INITIATIVE ORDINANCE

Shall an ordinance be adopted: enacting new agenda and meetings requirements for the City Council, the Rent Stabilization Board and all 30+ City Commissions, including limits on their ability to respond to emergencies and other time-sensitive issues; increasing disclosure requirements for public records; and creating a new commission with authority to sue the City, at an estimated combined annual cost of $2 million?

The city is required to provide an impartial summary of the ballot measure, but despite the fact that the term sunshine has been commonly used to describe such legislation for more than 50 years, the summary neither uses the word sunshine nor the term “open government.”

The $2 million dollars is laughable. San Francisco, a city and county with many more government functions and seven times the population of Berkeley has determined that its sunshine laws only cost the city $900,000 per year. This is nothing more than an effort by city staff to prevent a more democratic government, and we urge you to change the ballot summary to accurately describe the proposed Sunshine Ordinance.

In March 2011 you passed the “Open Government Ordinance” hoping to convince the public that this sunshine ordinance wasn’t necessary. But nothing has changed under the “Open Government Ordinance” because nothing in the ordinance is enforceable, and you created a commission with no authority do anything.

The proposed sunshine ordinance does not limit any of the city’s commissions and committees, or the City Council, to respond to emergencies and other time-sensitive issues. All the Sunshine Ordinance will do is require that the city follow the “Brown Act,” that all meetings are open and accessible to the public and that nothing new is quietly slipped into the agenda at the 11th hour.

Yes, the sunshine ordinance does give the Sunshine Commission the power to sue the city, but only when it does not follow the law and refuses to make legally-public documents and meetings accessible to all.

The following is proposed language that is neutral and more accurate:

CITY OF BERKELEY OPEN GOVERNMENT INITIATIVE ORDINANCE

Shall an ordinance be adopted: enacting new agenda and meeting requirements for the City Council, the Rent Stabilization Board and all 30+ City Commissions, increasing disclosure requirements for public records, and replacing the Open Government Commission with a new Commission, with authority to enforce this ordinance if provisions in this ordinance are not followed.

We urge you to meet with The Sunshine Ordinance Committee to find a way to make the language as neutral as possible and give the voters of Berkeley an understanding of what the initiative is about.

If you insist on using the staff proposed language, then we will do everything within our power to ensure that the people of Berkeley are not misled about this important ordinance that can only shed a greater light on what is truly the public’s business.

Sincerely, 

Dean Metzger and the Sunshine Ordinance Committee