Witt Rebukes 5 City Officials on Closed Meeting

San Diego City Atty. John Witt on Wednesday admonished five members of the City Council to avoid private meetings that could be considered a violation of the state’s open meetings laws.

Witt’s rebuke came after council members Ed Struiksma, Mike Gotch, Uvaldo Martinez, Bill Cleator and Judy McCarty met with about 70 community and business leaders to discuss options for bailing out the San Diego Symphony.

Reporters were barred from the session despite their objections that any gathering of a majority of the nine-member council for reasons other than socializing should be considered a public meeting. Witt later agreed with that assessment.

“If they’re just going over for a light social occasion, that’s one thing,” he said. “If they’re going over to do any sort of business that could be considered as action taken, and that’s a fairly broad definition, then it could be considered a violation of the Brown Act,” the state law regulating the conduct of local government business, he said.

Struiksma, who organized and hosted the meeting over breakfast at the Westgate Hotel downtown, told reporters that they could not listen in because he intended to pressure the business community to contribute to the symphony and did not want to embarrass anyone in public.

Lee Grissom, president of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce and a co-host of the meeting, said there was going to be “some pretty serious arm-twisting and we didn’t think it would be appropriate to have the media in there.”

Despite Struiksma’s order, a Los Angeles Times reporter entered the meeting room part way through the discussion and was allowed to stay.