This story was originally published by Fresnoland.
New documents revealed in a lawsuit against the City of Fresno show that at least one city leader questioned whether Fresno’s budget process in 2023 followed state transparency laws.
That internal dialogue took place two months before Fresnoland published an August 2023 investigation that questioned whether Fresno’s budget process violated California’s Brown Act. For a span of five years, the Fresno City Council’s budget committee met privately with the mayor’s administration to negotiate the city budget.
Fresnoland’s investigation two years ago quoted several legal experts who said under no circumstances should a city council committee meet privately on a regular basis for several years — especially about the city’s budget. The investigation also found that out of California’s 10 largest cities, Fresno was the only one to claim its city council budget committee to be exempt from state transparency laws.
California’s Brown Act has been around for more than 70 years now, and it requires public agencies and local governments to meet in public. After Fresnoland’s August 2023 investigation, the Fresno City Council disbanded its budget committee, along with 10 other committees that met privately.
Fresno City Attorney Andrew Janz claimed in 2023 that the city council’s budget committee is not subject to the Brown Act since it gets dissolved after the passage of a budget — typically in late June — and then reformed the next year.
However, emails revealed in the lawsuit appear to directly contradict the city attorney’s claim.
Between 2019 and 2023, the Fresno City Council convened private budget committee meetings throughout the year, not just during the summer budget process, according to court documents.
At least 11 email threads revealed in court documents show how the Fresno City Council’s budget committee met outside the city’s June budget process. Names of councilmembers and other top city officials, along with dates and mentions of the budget committee are highlighted in these documents. Click here to read the emails.
In November 2023, three months after Fresnoland’s investigation, the City of Fresno was sued over the city council’s private budget committee by the First Amendment Coalition and the ACLU of Northern California. Documents obtained by the two public interest litigants during the lawsuit’s discovery phase were recently made available to the public.
“We knew the broad outlines of the case near the beginning — that this was a serious problem thanks in large part to your (Fresnoland’s) excellent reporting,” said David Loy, an attorney with the First Amendment Coalition. “What we learned is just how deep the problem was.”
Janz, along with the city’s outside legal counsel, attorneys from Aleshire & Wynder, LLP, did not respond to a list of detailed questions from Fresnoland about the recently released court documents.
Loy told Fresnoland that he has never heard of a local government “having the temerity to create a secret committee to advise the city council on its budget.”
“That is the most fundamental governing task there is,” Loy told Fresnoland.
Two years ago, experts told Fresnoland that local government committees are where the heavy lifting happens in shaping and drafting policies before it goes before a final decision-making body.
Those committees are identified as standing committees subject to California’s Brown Act, which requires the public to be able to attend meetings and agencies must release meeting agendas at least 72 hours in advance.
Fresno’s city clerk flagged issues with budget committee
In the middle of Fresno’s budget process in June 2023, a staffer at the Fresno City Attorney’s Office wrote a group email to several colleagues, asking for details on an upcoming private budget committee meeting.
Fresno City Clerk Todd Stermer was among the recipients, but he didn’t respond with dates and times.
“I have no details. The budget subcommittee is currently not a Brown Act body. I don’t know when they meet. There are no agendas or minutes,” Stermer said over email to Noemi Schwartz, the Fresno city attorney’s executive assistant.
“The body should actually be dissolved because it was a limited purpose committee to discuss one aspect of the FY 19 budget,” Stermer added in his email. “Or it should be changed to a broader purpose Brown Act Committee.”
Stermer on Wednesday told Fresnoland he couldn’t comment on matters currently being litigated in court.
This June 2023 email exchange, revealed in court documents, demonstrates that at least one Fresno city official — the city’s Brown Act compliance officer — was already questioning the legality of the Fresno City Council’s private budget committee prior to Fresnoland’s investigation.
“That’s as close to a smoking gun as we’re ever going to get,” Loy said. “Not that we needed it to prove our case, but just extraordinary that the City Attorney’s Office wants to know what’s going on and the city clerk can’t answer that — this committee is operating largely in complete darkness: no agenda, no minutes.”
“I’m stunned,” Loy told Fresnoland.
Other emails revealed via court documents show how top city officials, councilmembers and members of the public were confused by decisions made by the city council’s private budget committee, and couldn’t keep up with them.
For example, former Fresno Fire Chief Kerry Donis was so surprised by the budget process in 2022 that she wrote to her colleagues about how she’d never seen anything like it before.
“In all of my years in Administration (19) I have never witnessed what happened at Council today,” Donis wrote in a June 2022 email thread. “The Council made a motion to approve ALL 92 budget motions as presented – and it passed without discussion 7-0!”
Emails also show that on August 17, 2023, the day after Fresnoland’s investigation was published, Fresno city staff edited the city website to say that the city council’s budget committee dissolved about two months prior on June 23, 2023.
However, the budget committee had scheduled another private meeting just three days prior on Aug. 14 — two months after the purported end date of the council’s budget committee.
“It does very much look like, according to emails that we obtained in discovery, that the staff were attempting to retroactively manufacture an end date of the budget committee,” Loy said. “It’s very troubling that it looks like they may have been trying to cover their tracks.”
One councilmember’s concern with discussing budget matters in public
The newly released court documents also revealed that Councilmember Mike Karbassi was concerned in April 2023 about how three budget items were going to be discussed in a public midyear budget presentation.
Instead, he wanted the city council’s budget committee to meet privately first, to discuss Fresno’s Eviction Protection Program, warming centers and the downtown Fresno water tower. In his email thread with City Manager Georgeanne White, Karbassi said discussing the matters in public, instead of first discussing it privately, could lead to “a fight, which won’t look good publicly.”
Karbassi suggested to White that city administrators should work more with the council’s private budget committee.
“It would help to work closely with the budget committee since the council leadership are already included,” Karbassi wrote in the April 2023 email thread. “That’s only my opinion.”
White responded by listing out some options, including delaying a vote to adjust the budget in order to accommodate a private budget committee meeting.
Karbassi declined to answer emailed questions from Fresnoland about the April 2023 email thread.
“Upon advice from the City Attorney I will not comment on pending litigation,” Karbassi wrote via email. “Litigation I firmly believe the City will ultimately prevail in.”
“The City of Fresno has the most transparent and open budget process in the region,” Karbassi added.
Loy told Fresnoland that Karbassi’s April 2023 email thread reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how local government is supposed to work.
“This is exactly why we have the Brown Act,” Loy said. “Nothing is more fundamental to transparency than the budget of the city, and this is precisely why we have a Brown Act to guarantee full visibility and transparency into precisely these kinds of admittedly very difficult decisions.”
In June 2024, the Fresno City Council did not convene a private budget committee for the first time since it began doing so in 2018. Karbassi told Fresnoland at the time that the change made the city council’s budget process more transparent but less efficient.
Loy challenged the idea that efficiency should come at the cost of transparency with the public.
“Sometimes democracy is not always the most efficient process of government, right?” Loy said. “Secrecy is in some senses more efficient and easier, but the Brown Act reflects the judgment of the people in the State of California — that transparency is the oxygen of accountability in government.”
Even after concerns were flagged, budget committee still met
From 2019 to 2023, the Fresno City Council’s budget committee negotiated the budget with the mayor’s office and executive staff in meetings closed to the public. Councilmembers have described those negotiations as an integral part of the budget process, yet it’s not accessible to the public.
Janz’s argument is that the city council’s budget committee is an ad hoc, temporary committee since it automatically dissolves after the approval of a budget, and reforms the next year.
Court documents reviewed by Fresnoland do not appear to support the claim that the council’s budget committee went away after the summertime passage of a budget.
For example, in 2020, the budget committee met with former Mayor Lee Brand in October, long after a budget was approved in June that same year. Earlier that year in May, the committee was also convened, and the calendar invite was titled “Weekly Budget Subcommittee.”
The court documents show how in 2022, the city council’s budget committee scheduled at least five private meetings before or after the budget got passed: two meetings in February, another in March, one in May and another in November.
In 2023, the council’s budget committee appeared to have met at least two times in April and two times in May.
“It just only further confirms that this was a standing committee,” Loy said. “I mean, even without the mid-year budget adjustments, it would still be a standing committee. Because it’s doing the same thing every year for five years, even if all it did was the reconciliation process.”
Although Stermer, Fresno’s city clerk, flagged potential issues with the city council’s budget committee in June 2023, nothing changed. At the time, the Fresno City Council’s budget committee consisted of Tyler Maxwell, Annalisa Perea and Karbassi.
Maxwell’s chief of staff at the time, Laura Garcia, replied to the June 2023 email thread with dates and times for three scheduled private budget committee meetings, and said they’d be taking place at the city manager’s conference room.
On Aug. 14 — two months after a new budget was passed in June and two days before Fresnoland’s investigation was published on Aug. 16 — the council’s budget committee scheduled another private meeting to discuss the city’s policy on sister city travel.
How the lawsuit moves forward
The ACLU of Northern California and First Amendment Coalition have had the same end goal since they filed a lawsuit against Fresno in November 2023.
The plaintiffs are asking Fresno County Superior Court Judge Robert Whalen to declare that the Fresno City Council’s budget committee held private meetings in violation of California’s Brown Act.
They are also seeking for Whalen to compel the City of Fresno to conduct all future budget committee meetings in public to comply with the Brown Act.
Loy said Whalen could rule on the lawsuit this year.
“The Brown Act is written the way it is to ensure the public has full visibility into how the sausage is made, not just how it’s served,” Loy told Fresnoland, referencing a celebratory, but infamous quote from Mayor Jerry Dyer about the 2023 budget process.