Petition: Free the Brown Act from Budget Suspense

Posted by Terry Francke, General Counsel | Jul 20, 2012 | Awareness Area: Government, Legal Issue: Open Government, Legal Issue: Open Meetings, News | 0 |

CalAware has just created an online petition with Change.org, directed to key officials of the California Assembly: “Free the Brown Act from Budget Suspense!” We hope we can collect hundreds if not thousands of signatures as soon as possible, and we could really use your help.

To read and sign the CalAware petition, click here. It’ll just take a minute!

Once you’re done, please ask your friends and others on any personal discussion lists or social media sites you maintain to sign the petition as well, and to pass the word on to their circles. You can keep tabs on how the signatures mount up and what people are saying about the petition by checking the page now and then at the above link.

Let’s get the Assembly’s attention and let them know we’re keeping score. Use your First Amendment right of petition—that’s what it’s there for. And at this point only a petition like this will allow the people to vote to free the Brown Act from the budget mess.

About The Editor

Terry Francke, General Counsel

Terry Francke has a 39-year history of helping journalists, citizens and public officials understand and use their First Amendment and open government rights. With CalAware, Francke has authored comprehensive and authoritative guidebooks to California law on access to government meetings and public records and the news gathering and publication rights of journalists. Focusing on these issues in public forum law, he supervises CalAware's legislative and litigation initiatives; conducts workshops on legal compliance; helps design public records audits; supports local sunshine ordinance drafting efforts; writes CalAware Today, a blog on current developments and proposals in the law and best practices; and answers countless queries by phone and e-mail from citizens, journalists, public officials and employees, and lawyers. Francke previously served 14 years as executive director and general counsel to the California First Amendment Coalition, after a 10-year post as legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association. He has served as an advisory panel member to the National Center on Courts and the Media; taught journalism law at the Department of Communication at Stanford University; and served as an expert contributor to the 1994 major revisions to the Ralph M. Brown Act and the 2004 ballot proposition making open government a basic right of citizens under the California Constitution. Francke is a 1967 graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a 1979 graduate of McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific. Prior to his legal career, Francke worked as a weekly newspaper editor and in military and local government public affairs positions.

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