Teacher Provides City Hall a Lesson on Open Meeting Law

Amid piles of papers and backbreaking books in his La Verne home, chemistry instructor Richard McKee sits in his oak chair, trying to unlock secrets.

Not the secrets of hydrocarbons or nucleotides--but the secrets of Claremont City Hall. This time, McKee is scouring his notes to figure out how to force the city to divulge a settlement of a recent federal court lawsuit.

Last time, his cause was outing the private deliberations of his own colleagues at Pasadena City College. And the time before: a closed-door firing by the Chino school board.

“I hate secrets,” says the hulking, mustachioed academic, whose anti-establishment bent is reflected in his collection of wild print shirts. “It really bothers me when the public doesn’t know how the government is throwing away its money.”

With such unflagging conviction, McKee, 51, has become the scourge of public agencies across the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles County--a John Q. Public who knows the state’s arcane open meeting and public record acts as well as the Periodic Table of the Elements.

He’s the citizen who won’t shut up and go away. As such, he has earned the ire of city officials and the applause of the California 1st Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit legal group based in Sacramento that advocates open government. The organization has given McKee its Torchbearer award for his work as a self-appointed watchdog.

“He’s a selfless crusader,” said Terry Francke, the coalition’s general counsel. “He has won significant rulings.”

Meanwhile, attorneys for five public agencies that have recently gone up against him did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.

McKee’s cause is similar to that of community groups accusing the Los Angeles Board of Education of violating the open meeting law in its recent move to essentially strip Supt. Ruben Zacarias of his powers.

Yet most of the time, such technicalities are the province of lonely souls such as McKee, who says the driving force behind his one-man holy war is a maxim from President Harry S. Truman: Secrecy and free, democratic government don’t mix.

“There are many politicians out there trying to hide their mistakes from the bright lights of public scrutiny,” said McKee as he sat at home beneath a wall of framed news clippings about his exploits. “I make sure they wash their dirty laundry in public.”

McKee began the rinse cycle five years ago, when he happened upon the state’s open meeting law in a toss-away guide to local government.

It was then, he said, that he realized that public agencies often violated the 1953 Brown Act, which requires them to conduct business in public and provide detailed agendas.

He took the plunge. He sued the City Council of Glendora, where he lived at the time, for allegedly making budget adjustments without informing the public. He lost twice, and the city manager labeled his actions harassment.

The former college basketball player’s next target: the Bonita Unified School District, in which his son was a student. McKee became such a persistent presence at board meetings that trustees convened a meeting of their own to bone up on the Brown Act. Eventually, they invited McKee to oversee a special tax election.

But when the Chino Unified School District was less than amenable to a complaint of his, he sued. That battle resulted in his first court victory in November 1997, when a San Bernardino Superior Court judge ruled that the board had illegally fired its superintendent behind closed doors, in violation of the Brown Act.

McKee’s biggest victory, however, came after he quit a sabbatical review panel at Pasadena City College in a huff over its secret deliberations. He turned around and sued, winning a precedent-setting decision last December that the panel was a “legislative body” that must meet in public.

In that case, he served as his own attorney, squeezing trips to law libraries and courts in between being a single parent and teaching.

And he is doing the same in an even higher-stakes lawsuit he filed against Claremont in August that goes to trial next month in Los Angeles Superior Court.

His aim: to unlock the details of a federal court settlement between the city and a libertarian activist who claimed that police improperly arrested him.

The activist, Eli Mellor, sued the city in 1996 for false imprisonment, malicious prosecution and excessive force after a traffic incident. His attorney and the city agreed to a settlement in June 1998, and the terms were sealed by a federal judge.

The city says that is why it can’t give McKee the settlement details. Claremont’s attorney, Scott Grossberg, said the city is bound to secrecy because, based on the Constitution, the ruling of a federal judge supersedes state law.

But McKee and a number of 1st Amendment attorneys counter that under the California Public Records Act, the city was forbidden to enter into any confidential settlement. And furthermore, they say, the federal judge only sealed the court record--not the terms of the settlement.

Prevailing in the case, they say, will close a loophole used by an increasing number of local governments to hide sometimes embarrassing settlements amounting to millions of dollars.

“What occurred in Claremont appears to be happening increasingly,” said Francke, the 1st Amendment Coalition attorney.

Win or lose, McKee expects to land next in the state Court of Appeal, where--among others--the California Newspaper Publishers Assn. may provide support.

The fight may be long and hard, but it’s necessary, said McKee, who gets as animated as Jack Nicholson at a Laker game when he talks about the people’s right to know.

“People in government count on the public just going away,” he said. “But we can’t allow the good ol’ boys to take over local government.”