asked mr. herrera and the library commission, why are you so determined to stick to this action? and they refused to even discuss it. the only thing they discussed is they asked mr. herrera can we do this, and mr. herrera says, the city attorney says you can. but the city attorney did not say you can, he said you may. it was a choice. i made a conscious choice to exclude these statements to put them some elsewhere. they put them somewhere else because of an addendum it is less likely that someone will read them, it is less likely that someone because they are taken out of context willfully understand them and the relationship of the comments to the other comments that were made by members of the library commission, the city librarian or other members of the public. and mr. herrera wants to make it seem like, well, we did all of this stuff it was a pulling

teeth exercise, first they would not put them in at all then they put them in as an addendum and after two and a half years of going back and forth we are finally agreeing to do it right and we want you to just ignore the fact that for two years we did it wrong. as far as i can tell the document that you have been presented this is the first time that they have included 150 word summaries from other members of the public. for a while they included some of mine, but didn't include others. so it was like, mr. hartz gets special treatment and his go in

the body of the minutes, but these other people can be addendaed. they keep changing their position and changing what they want to do and what, you know, what the requirements are and at no time have they made any decision at the library commission stating that the example that you have is their policy going forward. so basically, as far as the reality goes, they could simply go back tomorrow and change these right back to where they were and very frankly having dealt with mr. herrera for the last two years, and actually having public records withheld from me, had him drag that out for 18 months, finally having to go back to the task force and having them rule it, yes, you did not follow the determination and you still withheld this and we are going to refer to the board of supervisors for action speaks pretty clearly as to his approach to this. he did not like what we had to

say. the library commission did not like what we had say. if if they could not shut us up, and i will remind you this was the same library commission where you voted to recommend to the mayor that the president be removed for silenting public comment. well that kind of taught them a lesson that they are not allowed to silence public comment but if they can marginalize it or depreciate ate they are determined to do that. the simple fact that they have now after all of this time decided to provide you with an example that really has never been discussed at the library commission and mr. herrera has constantly raised one thing he has constantly raised the idea that i don't get to determine these things, the library commission does. and yet now we have these minutes, which are the library commission minutes and he has changed them without any

discussion with the library commission. he talks out of both sides of his mouth. >> i thought was to take public comment and then for the commissioners to ask whatever questions we might have of mr. hartz and mr. herrera? is that an acceptable procedure for the commission? >> public comment? >> good afternoon, chair hurtado i'm patrick and here as my private exercising the first amendment rights to free speech. it is troubling, mr. herrera gets up here and talks about 150-word summaries, i believe that the language in the sunshine ordinance that if you submit 150-word written public testimony to be incorporated

without being summarized by anybody. submitted in 150 words and have you to publish it exactly the way that it is submitted. you are here to enforce provisions of the sunshine ordinance. you are not here to allow good government guide to supercede, trump, the sunshine ordinance. there are many things in mr. herrera's good government guide that are not worthy of being used as toilet paper. you will see the parallel to the problem mr. hartz is encountering with the good government guide similar issue in your next agenda item and mr. wooding's case in which the good government guide also contains material on page 89 that is not worthy of a public

rest room. page 89 of the good government guide says that departmental destruction policies for material that remains on back up tapes or analogous paper records that the department may have lawfully discarded but may be found in the city-owned dumpster, these are the public records act that would be separate. and the sunshine ordinance requires to search the trash for such records that is pure nonsense, the back up tapes are there for daily use, speaking as an experienced secretary, i know that almost every secretary in this city understands from the get-go

that if they lose a document, it can be pulled from back up tape. if they inadvertently delete a document, a memo or a draft version of a memo or a version of a document going through a revision cycle. the secretary inadvertently is a human makes an error and deletes something, departmental is there to recover it immediately. i have done so over the 14 years of my career. none of it has been intentionally and it has always been restored from back up tape. mr. herrera good government guide needs to be rewritten and you need to tell them to rewrite it. >> i'm ron mcclock and i am a citizen and i have been going to the city meetings for 40

years with the arts commission and to the board of supervisors also and i found that this concept of minimum of three minutes is being used as a maximum of three minutes. i have gone to meetings where myself and my brother were the only people at the meetings and yet after three minutes, we have been told our time is up and please sit down. basically shut up. so i have gone to art commission meetings and presented my 150-word statement because i wanted to make sure the points that i wanted to have brought out were put into the minutes of the meeting. the city attorney is incorrectly says that just because you hand in that piece of paper, that that is an not actually what should be put in the minutes. when i hand that piece of paper in, i'm handing that piece of paper as a summary of what i am

saying and as far as i am concerned, because i am given such a short time to really say anything. i can write down on that piece of paper before the meeting, exactly what i want the commission and the boards to hear. and so i would ask that you up hold mr. hartz position, because as a citizen, we at times have to be able to have our words put into the body of the minutes because that is where we intend to say it and because we are being denied the amount of time to say it by writing it down before the meeting and passing it in at that time, that that qualifies as being said at the meeting. thank you. >> thank you very much. >> stop the hate and don't give money to the friends of the library and don't accept the money from the friends of the

library. the provision of being able to allow people to summarize their own words passed by the voters in 1999 in the sunshine ordinance, before it passed i was one of the most blatant victims. i started to submit citizen summaries right after the law went into effect, they created something called appendix a, even though there was no notice in the minutes themselves that there was an appendix, the type face was smaller than anything else in the minutes. s of course, they refused to include the appendix on the on-line version even though the minutes were submitted by e-mail. and after several years, i pointed out to the secretary, that the superior court had every case document on-line and after that, they put the appendix in a pdf and if you clicked the tiny link on the bottom there was no link back. finally, they stopped

distributing the appendix with the draft minutes that are distributed to 250 people. it was not distributed to the commissioners and the public at the library meeting where they were approved. the only place that it was attached to the minutes was the two copies that went to the archive. at that point i stopped submitting them for a while and that was when i started beginning my public comments with stop the hate, stop the ignorance and don't give money to the friends of the library and don't accept money from the friends of the library. they can't claim that they have any claim to good faith or being reasonable because they have never done anything, unless they were forced to. no matter how unreasonable it was. getting rid of the public has always been acceptable whether their methods were legal or illegal. what is the essential underlying problem? the underlying problem is that when rich and influential people offer them money to keep

out the undesirable, quote unquote, they accept that money. they are proud of themselves because they can count the money, but they can't count the harm to our expectations to justice and the damage to the social fabric, the problem is that the definition of an desirable is completely self-serving, it is just someone who is not in on the ground. that they themselves enjoy. as a matter of fact when the undesirables complain about their abuse and corruption, it triggers a $5 donation to what they call the public comment fund. so that the public comment can be demeaned as just raising more money for the friends. commission president gomez contributes to it and they have a cover story. it is that they are just taunting the crazy guy. some cover story.

>> good afternoon commissioners, dr. derek kurr. excluding public comment from the body of a minutes is really an act of disrespect. it is a statement that says that the members of the public are inferior, to the people on a particular commission or board or other body. and this is a wide-spread problem. and it will be so easily fixed many of the citizens who speak are extremely knowledgeable about the issues that they bring to your attention. so, it will be easy to just put the comments in the minutes and please everyone. >> i also want to speak in

support of mr. hartz's point that if you do not find that some fault occurred, there is no reason for the library to not switch back to what they were doing before. because if they can get away by switching, and putting something in the body for a while, and just as easy they may decide not to do it, so really there should be some promise or some commitment from the agency to make the change a policy change, a permanent change. and thank you very much. >> who would have thought that ten years after the sunshine ordinance was adopted we would

be arguing over a legal term called attachment. the plain reading, the ordinary reading that any person would get would mean the inclusion in the body of the minutes. and that is what the public probably understood in 1999, when it adopted the sunshine ordinance. the concept is attachment is really a legal concept and it is actually said as attached hereto and incorporated herein and we don't get that i think that it is quasi legal ordinances in. the government guide is an unsupported comment from the city attorney, there is no

opinion, there is no justification for it and it is not worth the sense that it is written on. if it were, supported with some legal basis, of case law, differently. different results. it is the task force's job to determine these issues, not the city attorney's. that is what it is there for. it is the determinations are enforcable. the fact that mr. herrera has repeatedly poked his finger in the eye of the public about these written summaries, is an indication of the willfulness of this conduct. the final point i think that i should make is, prop 59 requires ordinances, laws, findings and so forth, that support public access to be

construed. requiring a change through the good government guide does not accomplish that purpose, it actually restricts the specific terms of an ordinance. the dictionary definition expressing the situation of something that is or appears to be enclosed or surrounded by something else. i don't see the word attachment anywhere in that. >> paula davis and i want to endorse what ray hartz said, i think that it is very important for the written summary to be included in the body of the minutes and i can speak to myself and the minute that it took place in a street art meeting on november 14, 2012

when i was escorted out of the building when i was speaking under public comment and it was less than 3 minutes and 153 words and what appeared in the minutes of that meeting was a statement underlined statement four times. no idea what that was about. but my words were not heard that day. thank you. >> peter wolf director of library users associations. the library abuses of the public through violations of the law is a long-standing one and you actually had a referal from the sunshine task force about a complaint that i made some years ago. it was the first one that was included by or within mr. grossman's legal case, which

was settled presumably out of court. the library's history of attempts to exclude or to blur, essentially silence public comment with which it does not agree is a long-standing one. the best example that i can think of from quite a ways back aside from the ones where it said peter warfield discussed his opinions about such and such was on a heated item in the past which had to do with an rfid issue. in which the participants got not a single word of summary in their own minutes including the aclu and the electronic frontier foundation which was opposed to the implementation of rfid. and the public was given five words or less in some cases of sentence fragments to summarize

what they said. in my case, peter war field, process used to consider rfid. that was the entire entry for what i had spent three minutes discussing march 4, 2004. i think that mr. herrera's history starts right from the very beginning of this tenure as city librarian, when he set up a so-called technology and privacy advisory committee to look into the question of rfid, the advisebility of rfid installation which people thought was intended to justify it. there, there was initially, no inclusion at all of public comment in the committees meetings it was not strictly required by sunshine. eventually, the public got to comment last. if you look on the website there are no minutes of those

meetings as the agendas were published and when the report was finally published, it was arranged that the final report had no mention whatsoever anywhere including in the table of contents that there was a whole section that they had intended to include with public comment and that is no mention there at all. there is a separate document which, of course is very easy not to find. this is a long-standing issue and we hope that you find in ray hartz's favor, thank you. >> questions, by the commissioners for either the complainant mr. hartz or the respondent mr. herrera? >> i have a question for mr.

herrera. >> would you mind returning to the podium? >> thank you. >> thank you, mr. herrera. so, the draft format that you distributed today, is that the policy and practice that has been adopted by the library commission going forward? >> it is yet to be adopted but that is what we are intending to do from this point forward. >> and it will be applied to all speakers? >> yes. >> thank you. >> while you are there, mr. herrera, a question. why were you so resistant to putting the 150 words in the body of the minutes as opposed to putting them on as an attachment. >> we had worked with the city attorney's office and followed the good government guide and so based on that opinion, we had basically continued to assert that we were in compliance by attaching them

and including them as an attachment. >> but you were aware that after the city attorney had issued that opinion, the sunshine task force said that opinion was wrong and wanted them to go into the body of the minutes. why did you continue to resist that? >> again, we basically went on the opinion and followed the city attorney's advice. all of the other commissions were doing the same thing it was not until your commission changed its practice that we followed suit. to do that. >> now, if a member of the public went to the library commission's website, it would get the minutes and it would also pull up the attachments? >> they are included as part of the minutes, that is correct. >> so that from the point of view of the public, the information which you are now proposing to include in the body of the minutes, to the public, it was a matter of just

simply reading what was attached to the official minutes? >> that is correct. >> that is correct. >> thank you. >> mr. herrera, i also have a couple of questions. and so if a member of the public were to go on to the website and download the minutes, would the minutes, or would the 150-word summary be in the same document as the rest of the minutes or a separate document that would be attached to the minutes. >> i would defer to the commission secretary, i am speculating that they are part of the minutes, but i can verify. >> blackman, library commission secretary, yes they were all part of one document. so you stroll through the minutes and we actually put in the minutes where the speaker made his comments please see addendum for the 150 word statement. >> so in the library

commission's minutes the speaker made a comment there would be a shorter summary of that speakers comments and a reference to later in the minutes where the full 150 word summary was provided. >> correct. >> thank you. >> any further questions for miss blackman? >> yes, i have a question of mr. hartz. yes, commissioner. >> have you reviewed the draft that mr. herrera says is going to be the form that the commission is going to adopt going forward in so far as including public comments? >> i have reviewed it yes. >> and assuming that they adopt it and implement it, does that cure your concern? >> no. >> why. >> because the similar simple

fact is that they did else wise for two years, i would like to point something out on those particular minutes that you are seeing, up until these minutes another member of the public, mr. james chavy submitted 150 word summaries also and his remains as an addendum through december of last year. and their statements that they put it in the addendum and then noted in the thing that has changed, that has been so many variations, if you go back through and look through the notes, sometimes it was a blue numeral i, as he mentioned you had to click on that and once you clicked on that you could see my comment but you could not get back to the rest of the minutes. >> my question is if they adopt this, going forward n spite of all of your complaints about the past, i want it know whether this cures the problem

that you believe existed? >> no. >> and the reason is that if you look at the two cases i'm talking about, mr. chafy's comments are listed as a summary of his comments provided, mine is listed as a statement read by. which is not accurate. i did read the statement, but that is not all that i said. and up until this set of minutes, they would add additional comments. they would put additional comments before me 150-word summary or after the 150-word summary or sometimes both. so basically they had been all over the place and for them to come up here and answer a question by one of your members and say this is the way that we have always did it and they have been all over the board. all of these are approved documents and if you go back and look at them, they have handled this in every possible way, that is different.

now you are saying is this, you know, i think trying to make it sound like i am being unreasonable. >> no, i'm trying. >> what i am saying is they have not established a clear policy on how they are going to handle these because even in the minutes you have got they are handling them in two different ways. >> how are they handling them in two different ways? show me. >> saying that he read the following statement and if you go back to page number one, you see mr. chafes submission and it is proceeded with the following written summary as provided by the speaker a citizen and the content is

never generated by or subject to approval of the verification of accuracy >> that is a copy, starting with the word stop over to the word check, at the top of of the second page, that is a verbatim of what the written statement was, correct? >> in which page are you talking about? one or three? >> that is page one, it says a written statement was provided by the speaker. >> right. >> and then it goes on and it was what appears to be the written statement starting with the word stop, right? >> yes. >> ending with the word check on page 2. >> yes, that is the entire 150-word or less statement. >> right. >> right? >> that is all that you are asking them to do, isn't it? is to include the statement itself, the written statement that