"We've done a great job in creating a presumption of openness. We have to balance that with how we d

SACRAMENTO (CN) - A long list of broad exceptions hotel downtown disney orlandoflorida attached to a draft rule that would open Judicial Council committee meetings to the press and public was met with cautious criticism Thursday from reporters and newspaper advocates.
"This is really open to wide discretion by whoever is on the committee," said Jim Ewert, General Counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association. "The exemptions they have created are very, very broad."
"We've done a great job in creating a presumption of openness. We have to balance that with how we do business," said Miller who heads the powerful Executive and Planning Committee that sets the agenda and the overall direction of the Judicial Council.
The lengthy list of broad exemptions in the draft rule would allow committee chairs to close meetings when the subjects are security plans, raw data and statistics, the buying hotel downtown disney orlandoflorida of property, legislative strategy, agenda setting, anything that involves attorney and client -- in all 17 exemptions, many of them with little or no definition.
The Judicial Council has a history of making decisions in closed-door committees hotel downtown disney orlandoflorida followed by open Judicial Council sessions where the committee decisions are unanimously approved hotel downtown disney orlandoflorida with little or no debate. Trial judges have said the council simply "rubber stamps" the decisions made secretly by the committees.
That manner of decision making drew the Legislature's attention this summer when lawmakers included a clause in the 2013 budget mandating hotel downtown disney orlandoflorida open meetings for all the council's myriad advisory committees, sub-committees, working groups and task forces.
Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the clause after lobbying from Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, who also said she was committed to opening as many committee meetings as possible. The Legislature then wrote language into a supplemental report requiring the Judicial Council to create more transparent meeting rules.
Pushing to comply with that language, the heads of the council's big four internal committees -- that set the council's agenda, propose new court rules, oversee court technology and advise on legislation -- presented the new rule at a press conference Thursday morning.
The press briefing took place in a pink-walled hearing room at the Capitol with the judges at a semi-circular table facing red, theatre-style seats where about 20 reporters asked questions, a far greater number than the one or two who attend Judicial Council meetings.
"It's something hotel downtown disney orlandoflorida we want to get right. It's something we're invested in and it's important hotel downtown disney orlandoflorida to the public," Miller told the reporters. "If we are going to spend public money it should be in a public setting."
"We just got it today and are still poring through it," said Ewert. "My initial take is I think it's interesting, and certainly not something they had to do, so to that end I think it's a good thing."
"There may be certain circumstances where a draft report may not be in the public interest to disclose, but give it a standard," he said. "This is really open to wide discretion by whoever is on the committee."
"Under the Public Records Act, even if that information is contained in a preliminary draft, courts have ruled that information can be extracted," he said. "The analyses hotel downtown disney orlandoflorida of that information, the thought processes of anyone who is preparing that information -- those things are exempt, but not the raw information itself. Those are facts that are always going to be facts. This leaves me wondering what the need for that exemption is."
Part of the difficulty faced by the Judicial Council relates to the enormous geography of California stretching 800 miles from the border with Mexico hotel downtown disney orlandoflorida to the border with Oregon, an expanse that includes 58 separate regional courts including the behemoth of the south, Los Angeles, and tiny Modoc County in the far north.
Because of the distance and a lack of funds, nearly all the council's advisory committees meet over the phone. The number of participants, generally judges and court administrators, can range into the hundreds.
"I was struck by was the idea that most of these meetings are conducted by teleconference and it's going to be interesting to see how they'll allow for public comment," Ewert said. "What happens during the meeting? How they provide hotel downtown disney orlandoflorida adequate public access to that going to be significant."
That tradition of closure is tied to a legendary controversy within California's judiciary, where a member of the court administrative office lobbying staff inserted language in a budget trailer bill would have stripped the power of local judges to choose their own presiding judge and head clerk, giving that power over to the Judicial Council which is strongly influenced by the administrative office.
In the telling of the story, it is described as a sneak attack on local courts in the darkness of a closed committee hearing, a classic example of over-reach by the mandarins on high. Running through the comments is the idea that such a gambit would never have survived a committee process that was open.
"There's a misconception that the advisory committees are policy making committees," said Miller in answer to that point. "They take their direction from the council and the council has to approve those in a public meeting."
"There are proposed laws on a regular basis that have an impact on the judicial branch and the negotiations the process of coming up with a bill that the judicial branch feels is more appropriate are very sensitive," Miller added. "If we had to hold those discussions in an open meeting there would be no point in negotiating. It's not that we want to keep legislative discussions behind closed doors."