Zoo meeting info not given to public
By: Beth Winegarner
Examiner Staff Writer
January 26, 2009
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| The nonprofit agency that runs the San Francisco Zoo does not post meeting agendas or provide reports and other documents to the public, in apparent violation of city and state open meeting laws. (Examiner file photo) |
SAN FRANCISCO — Daily doings at the San Francisco Zoo have been scrutinized intensely since a Siberian tiger fatally mauled a patron on Christmas Day 2007, but one of the animal park’s key decision-making bodies appears to be evading the public eye.
The San Francisco Zoological Society, the nonprofit agency that has managed the zoo since 1993, doesn’t post its meeting agendas and doesn’t provide key documents related to those meetings, an apparent violation of city and state open-meeting laws.
Under its contract with The City, the society is required to follow the same rules for public meetings as the Recreation and Park Department, the zoo’s former manager.
Those rules include notifying the public within 72 hours of a meeting, providing comprehensible meeting agendas, posting agendas in a public location and providing reports and other documents to the public, according to Roger Myers, an attorney for the California First Amendment Coalition, who also represents The Examiner.
However, the society's 65-member board of directors rarely finalizes its agenda until a day or two before the meeting, and generally doesn’t post agendas or make associated documents public, said zoo spokeswoman Lora LaMarca.
The agenda for Tuesday’s meeting was released an hour before it began.
“There’s no doubt they’re not providing timely notice,” Myers said, examining the agenda, which listed a number of committee reports but didn’t include those reports or specifics on what was to be discussed.
“Reports, when they are circulated to the board, are supposed to be publicly available,” Myers said. “If any of these items result in any action, that would violate the [law].”
The zoo receives more than $4 million annually from San Francisco’s general fund, is spending the last of a $48 million bond approved by voters 12 years ago and is crafting a new master plan for future improvements.
LaMarca, however, said she doesn’t believe the zoo is violating open-meeting laws, and at least one supervisor said he’s comfortable with the level of information the zoo commission shares.
“If people want specific information about what’s going on at the meetings, they can file a public-records request, and then we run them by our attorney,” LaMarca said. Whether the zoo must obey local and state meeting-access laws is “a matter of interpretation,”
she said.
Three members of the zoo board meet monthly on the Joint Zoo Committee with representatives from the Recreation and Park Commission. In addition, zoo leaders report monthly to the commission and quarterly to the Board of Supervisors.
Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, whose district includes the zoo, said that’s more than enough eyes.
“Whenever there’s a public question, they’ve answered it,” he said.
Penalties against public agencies that don’t follow public-access laws are rare, according to Terry Francke, co-founder of Californians Aware, an agency fighting for citizen access to government business.
“It’s not important — unless you care about how your tax money is spent or what controls the government has over your life,” he said.
Held accountable
Complaints handled by the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force in 2007 and 2008:
82 percent Access to public records
18 percent Access to meetings
69 percent Complaint hearings that lead to a finding of legal violation
Source: Sunshine Ordinance Task Force
