In what appears to be the first such ruling in the history of the Brown Act, an Orange County Superior Court judge has declared null and void an Anaheim City Council approval last year of a tax subsidy to a hotel developer worth up to $158 million. The reason, as Eric Carpenter reports for the Orange County Register: misleading language on a meeting agenda. While Judge Steven Perk also found that the way the deal was handled violated the Anaheim City Charter, the California Environmental Quality Act, the Planning and Zoning Law, and even the city’s own Hotel Development Economic Assistance Program, for once it was the often-scorned open meeting law that delivered the real hammer blow with its 26-year-old but never before executed remedy of nullifying an action taken with sufficiently illegal secrecy or surprise.
