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City attorney briefs commission on Brown Act, bylaws, quorum and naming procedures
Summary
City Attorney Albert Maldonado reviewed ordinance MC1 1454 and the commission’s enabling resolution, explained quorum and abstention rules, and delivered an extended Brown Act training including serial-meeting risks and social-media guidance under AB 992.
Albert Maldonado, deputy city attorney, briefed the Arts and Historical Preservation Commission on its legal duties and procedural rules, touching on municipal ordinance requirements, the commission’s charge and statewide open-meeting rules.
Maldonado highlighted two provisions of Ordinance MC1 1454: members must remain registered voters in the city and may not be city employees, and three consecutive unexcused absences cause a member to automatically cease holding the seat. He reviewed Resolution 2018-97, which defines the commission’s advisory role on arts, culture and historic preservation, and he outlined naming and renaming procedures in Resolution 2023-134.
On voting and attendance, Maldonado explained how to calculate quorum (a majority of the full body) and said commissions should count vacancies when assessing whether a quorum is present. He also read a bylaw provision saying an abstention by a member who is present and heard the full matter is counted as an affirmative vote under the commission’s bylaws. "If you abstain, it means your vote will be counted as a yes," Maldonado said, and he urged commissioners to vote 'no' rather than abstain if they do not want an item to pass.
Maldonado spent significant time on Brown Act rules: defining a "meeting" as any gathering of a majority of members to discuss city business, outlining prohibited serial-meeting patterns (chain and hub-and-spoke examples), exceptions for scheduling communications, teleconferencing rules that require public access at remote caller locations, and AB 992 guidance on social media. He warned that commissioners should not 'like' or comment on each other's public social-media posts about agency business because a quorum of interactive responses could risk a Brown Act violation; sharing agency posts to personal accounts was described as safer.
He encouraged commissioners to contact staff or the city attorney's office early if they anticipate conflicts of interest, absences, or recusal needs and recommended that staff use BCC for mass emails to commissioners to reduce inadvertent 'reply all' serial-meeting risks.
The briefing concluded with commissioners asking specific procedural questions and the city attorney offering to provide copies of the naming resolution and other materials for review.
