Will the City of Brownsville's six year-old ban on broadcasting the public comments made during commissioners' meetings on the city's Channel 12 come to an end this Tuesday?
An item on the agenda placed for Tuesday's meeting states: "Consideration and Action regarding the guidelines for broadcasting the city's public comment period. (Commissioner B. Neece/C. De Leon)
The ban has been in effect since then after city attorney Mark Sossi convinced incoming mayor Tony Martinez that resuming broadcasting the public comments on the public's airwaves would open the city to legal liabilities. Before his election, Martinez had vowed he would move to broadcast the public comments period and end the ban that his predecessor Pat Ahumada and the city commission had approved on Sossi's advice.
As other bloggers have stated, Sossi made that determination after a public commenter noted that Sossi appeared to have used his position to farm out legal work to a firm which had won a judgment against him, a fact first addressed by local watchdog Argelia Miller in a letter to city manager Charlie Cabler in August 25, 2010.
In her letter, Miller wrote Cabler that she was upset that Sossi appeared to be using the legal referral system to repay a $167,323 judgment to former employer, Willette & Guerra for theft of funds.
As blogger Jim Barton stated in his Brownsville Observer blog "When this obviously compounded conflict of interest was later mentioned during the Public Comment section of a subsequent City Commission meeting, Sossi had heard enough and issued the ludicrous legal opinion to Mayor Pat Ahumada and the City Commission that the continued broadcast of public comments on City of Brownsville's Channel 12 would make the city vulnerable to lawsuits."
Much to the surprise of former city commissioner Melissa Zamora, who had placed an item on the agenda to resume the broadcast of the public comment period, Martinez did not support her item saying: "I'd like to continue doing things the way the previous administration did them. It's been working pretty good so far. I don't want to change that."
Well, as they say en mi rancho, things have changed. Sossi is now a full-time city employee and his legal opinion is being challenged by two other attorneys (Neece and De Leon) with an apparently different opinion on the First Amendment. He and the mayor have been involved in decisions that have caused controversy for the city (and cot the public money) and which the public comment ban has protected them from popular criticism.
Is it time to give back the public airwaves to the people?