City politics go online

Internet is medium of choice for Surf City activists; now council will join action, place meetings on Web. If you can’t catch it live or watch the broadcast on television, Huntington Beach’s City Council meetings are now coming to viewers over a new medium -- the Internet.

City Clerk Joan Flynn announced the new format during a September strategic planning session. Although the details aren’t yet available, Flynn said viewers will be able to watch on-demand broadcasts of the meetings on the city’s website by the beginning of the year.

The city service is one of many ways the Internet is fusing Huntington Beach politics with citizens. Local activists have begun to create websites that rival expensively designed corporate sites, and other City Hall watchdogs are exploring newer high-tech tools to get their messages out.

“For us, it was a great medium to get to the masses,” said land activist Alan Gandall of Saveourfield.org.

After Gandall and neighbors received news that the Fountain Valley School District was planning to demolish several little league fields to make way for residential development, he and neighbors launched an Internet Web log, or blog, to help save the fieldS.

“I think there was a lot of gossip out there, and this was a way to immediately get people information about what was going on,” he said.

Besides providing day-to-day updates on the site and collecting donations, Saveourfield.org began posting audio interviews using a simple recording technology called podcasting. With just a digital recording device, Gandall and others taped interviews with politicians and then posted the sound files on the Internet. Users could listen to the interviews on their computers using a simple media player or download the files to their iPods.

When City Councilman Don Hansen announced that the city was going to purchase the parks from the school district, Saveourfield.org was the first group to broadcast an interview with Hansen outlining the deal.

“We found that we got huge responses from the site,” he said. “After that interview came out, numbers showed that it had been downloaded by over 3,000 people.”

As Web design gets easier, many activists find themselves able to create sites on a par with those of large corporations. After Connecticut-based Poseidon launched a marketing site to promote a controversial $250-million desalination plant, labor organizer John Earl responded with an anti-Poseidon site and e-mail campaign.

Moving beyond the typical activist site, Earl scanned in hundreds of pages of public documents on Poseidon -- making often hard-to-obtain documents available with the click of a mouse.

“The idea was to provide people with facts and enough faith in human beings to be able to make their own decisions,” he said. “We wanted users to know the information was honest information and minimize the amount of searching that someone else would have to do.”

Earl said he also uses the site and local e-mail groups to test ideas on local audiences before making them public. Mark Bixby, administrator of the popular e-mail group HBTalk, said many progressive ideas are often presented first on his site, although the unmoderated format can sometimes make for chaotic discussions.

“I trust people to behave, and when people aren’t behaving, I think that kind of turns others off,” he said.

There are also legal issues that arise when politics step into cyberspace. HBTalk members lobbied for the ouster of former planning commissioner Ron Davis in 2004 when he used a false identity on HBTalk to defend himself against online criticism.

Planning commissioner Bob Dingwall also recently came under fire for posting comments on desalination on an e-mail group run by the South East Huntington Beach Neighborhood Assn. City Attorney Jennifer McGrath said Dingwall could have violated California open meetings law if a majority of the planning commissioners had seen the e-mail.

And while the Internet has changed the way politicians behave online, it also changes the way they behave with online pundits, said OC Blog administrator “Jubal,” one of many political pundits on the site who uses a pseudonym.

“Blogs enable the campaigns to disseminate information that the dailies would generally ignore. The campaigns start looking to blogs to break stories, instead of just the print media,” said Jubal. “But the campaigns also have to be more careful, because the O.C. blogosphere is quick to pounce on and shine a light on errors and contradictions that might fly below the mainstream media’s radar.”

Even with the renewed online presence, many politicians said the Web commentary represents a small fraction of the larger political community.

“I occasionally monitor the sites, but I don’t think they represent the majority of an issue,” Huntington Beach City Councilman Keith Bohr said. “Most of these people are super-activists, not middle-of-the-road.”

Earl agreed that the Internet hasn’t yet replaced conventional political organizing.

“To me, the most important thing is outside of the Internet,” he said. “It’s not the primary organizing tool. You have to have local contacts. You have to have conversations with people and you have to build relationships.”20051020iol5o8knDOUGLAS ZIMMERMAN / INDEPENDENT(LA)Resident Mark Bixby is the administrator of the popular e-mail group HBTalk, a forum for local civic debate.