The San Diego City Council on Monday ended its first meeting of 2017 with a briefing on the Ralph M. Brown Act.
At it's core, the law is about open government. Passed in California in 1953, it requires local governments to make decisions in public meetings where anyone can listen and comment.
In late 2014, the council was suspected of violating the act with so-called "serial meetings," prior to the election of Sherri Lightner as council president.
Serial meetings are when a majority of council members have discussed a certain policy or decision in secret — not all at once, but through a string of smaller meetings or communications.
On the advice of the City Attorney's Office, the council held a second vote for the council president to clear the decision from suspected illegality.
The Brown Act also requires the council to discuss only those issues which have been publicly noticed. This occasionally leads to a representative of the city attorney shutting down discussion of certain issues during council meetings because they were not on the agenda.
The law has its critics — violations can be very difficult to prove, especially when there's no record of an illegal secret meeting taking place. And as Councilman Mark Kersey remarked at Monday's meeting, the law has an exemption for the state's own legislature in Sacramento.
