City Prevails in Lawsuit Alleging Open Meeting Law Violations in Gold Line Dealings

A judge has ruled in favor of the city in a lawsuit filed alleging that city officials violated open meeting laws by making changes to public documents in secret before approving revisions to the city's Station Square project.

Excalibur Property Holdings LLC sued Monrovia last April alleging that the planning commission violated the Brown Act by making changes to its agenda and a development plan without sufficiently notifying the public.

But Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ann Jones ruled Friday that the city made only "minor changes" to documents considered during a Feb. 10, 2010 meeting and did not violate the Brown Act, which requires officials to meet in public and notify the public of the meeting's subjects.

"Looking more broadly at the intent and purposes of the Brown Act, the [city has] fully complied with both the letter and the spirit of the act," Jones wrote Friday.

Lawyers for Excalibur contended in the lawsuit that the city improperly made changes to a plan governing the , a massive mixed-use development that the city plans to build along the Gold Line Foothill Extension.

Excalibur owns property within the proposed Station Square development area.

By changing the documents without notifying the public, the city effectively "rendered them different documents than what had previously been provided to the public by the city...," wrote Excalibur attorney Robert Silverstein in court filings.

Silverstein did not immediately return a call requesting comment on this story.

The company's civil complaint alleged that Monrovia engages in "a pattern and practice of publicly circulating documents for review and then significantly adding to, amending or altering said documents at the commencement of the public hearing, in effect, denying the public actual notice of what, in fact, the city, planning commission and its public bodies in fact intend to review and approve."

However, Jones ruled that the minor changes made by the city after the agenda was released to the public did not violate the law.

"[Excalibur's] argument that staff changes to documents may not occur once the agenda packet is prepared is wholly unsupported by the language of the Brown Act," Jones wrote.

The planning commission meeting in question considered zoning changes that would allow the city to build a in a section of the Station Square project area.

The city has been pushing forward with a plan to build the facility at a site bounded by Evergreen Avenue on the north, Shamrock Avenue on the east, California Avenue on the west and Duarte Road on the south in order to expedite the Gold Line Foothill Extension transit project.

The planning commission recommended that the city begin the environmental review process for the site during the Feb. 10, 2010 meeting, but the decision ultimately became moot when the Gold Line Construction Authority (GLCA) opted to conduct the environmental review process itself, according to City Manager Scott Ochoa.

In addition to being without merit, Ochoa said the lawsuit was filed over a decision that never actually amounted to anything.

"The planning commission doesn’t really make policy in this case--it recommends it to the City Council--and the City Council didn’t make policy on this," Ochoa said.

Ochoa said the lawsuit represents a problem with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) process, which he said can be misused by individuals for "obstructionist" purposes to stall public projects.

"There was not an action that the city took that ought to engender a lawsuit like this yet we will go through and spend taxpayer money and win, like we did in this case," Ochoa said.

Last month, the GLCA that designated the Monrovia site as the "preferred" site for its maintenance facility. If the project continues to progress as planned, the foothill extension could be completed in late 2014.