BETWEEN THE LINES -- Byron de Arakal

Certain elected rulers and appointed prefects in our Newport-Mesa

neighborhood must be having the same nightmare these days. It plays out

something like this:

Tucked snuggly beneath their comforters, they are awakened with a

start by the sound of scratching at their bedroom windows. Out there, on

the other side, back lit by great shards of lightning, are the pasty

white and moaning faces of Phil Arst and Paul Flanagan.

And in their hands, they hold ragged, bloodstained copies of the 1953

Ralph M. Brown Act.

“You represent UUUUSSSSSS,” they mewl. “Ooooopen the meetings.

Ooooopen the meetings. Ooooopen the meetings.”

So what’s behind this haunting? A bit of bad beef as Scrooge surmised

when the specter of Jacob Marley visited his bedchamber? Hardly.

The fuel for this incubus is a pair of complaints filed with the

Orange County district attorney’s office claiming possible violations of

the Brown Act by certain Newport Beach and Costa Mesa officials.

What we have is a small brigade of planning commissioners and city

council members from both cities whose below-the-radar powwows with the

developers of Home Ranch and the Koll Center Newport expansion have

ignited the eyebrows of Arst and Flanagan.

You should know that Arst is the regular occupant of the slow-growth

bully pulpit commanded by the Greenlight Committee. It’s the Greenlight

folks who are behind the campaign to torch the addition of a 10-story,

250,000-square-foot office building at the Koll Center Newport campus.

Too big and too much traffic, they warn. That one’s up for a citywide

vote on Tuesday.

Flanagan, on the other hand, is a tall and rather stately looking

gentleman with white hair wound as tight as a pig’s tail. He’s one of the

bomb throwers behind Costa Mesa Citizens for Responsible Growth, an

unknown number of Mesa Verde residents desperate to drive a stake through

the heart of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons’ Home Ranch project.

Both men claim that certain Planning Commissioners and City Council

members of these activists’ respective cities ran roughshod over the

spirit, if not letter, of the Brown Act. The officials did this, is the

activists’ charge, when they participated in a series of separate

closed-door meetings with the projects’ developers to hammer out the

details of the two projects’ development agreements.

In the case of the Koll development, it seems Newport Beach Councilman

Tod Ridgeway and Planning Commissioners Ed Selich and Larry Tucker sat on

the committee that negotiated the terms of the project’s development

agreement with the good folks from Koll. And as these were contract

negotiations between two parties, the public wasn’t asked to sit in.

As for Home Ranch, Mayor Libby Cowan joined Councilwoman Karen

Robinson, Planning Commissioner Bill Perkins and Planning Commission

Chairwoman Katrina Foley in participating on the committee that forged

the development agreement with the Segerstrom family governing the Home

Ranch project. These, too, were closed-door sessions without bleachers.

Now it’s pretty clear to me, having read the Brown Act more times than

any person should have to, that these elected and appointed folks have

clean hands. Breaking bread and negotiating private contracts with Koll

and the Segerstroms outside of the public gaze was not a nose thumbing of

the open-meeting intent of the Brown Act. That’s because these folks

weren’t officially functioning as the respective cities’ legislative

bodies at the time.

More important, the number of council members and planning

commissioners with a seat on these committees was too small to constitute

a quorum of either city’s Planning Commission or City Council.

I think both Arst and Flanagan know this but sent up Brown Act smoke

signals for the district attorney’s office to see as one more way of

lobbing mortar rounds into the camps that support these projects. Still,

it can’t make for sweet dreaming knowing that one’s name is being kicked

around the district attorney’s office as a potential target of

investigation.

The Brown Act haunting of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa can end simply,

however, by waking up. City Council members and planning commissioners

shouldn’t be seated at the negotiating table cobbling together

development agreements -- or any legal contract for that matter -- that

they must later vote on. That kind of folly, at the very least, is a

skunk in the public perception arena.

* Byron de Arakal is a writer and communications consultant. He lives

in Costa Mesa. His column runs Wednesdays. Readers may reach him with

news tips and comments via e-mail at o7 [email protected] .