OPEN UP THE MAC MEETINGS

By Dave Custodio

The Municipal Advisory Council (MAC)serves as a liason between the various local unincorporated areas of Contra Costa County and the District Supervisor, in our case Federal Glover. The MAC may be either appointed or elected. Ours is elected. We shoulkd try to use the MAC as a conduit of the people's input and pressure, not as an adjunct to county government.

To realize the goal, the MAC must be as open as possible. Ironically, the MAC often behaves as if it resents, rather than encourages, divergent opinion on the one hand, and is often reticent to share its information with the citizens that attend the meetings, on the other. It is common to hear the MAC invoke the "Brown" or "Open Meeting" act to foreclose public participation, or comments from the board members, in the proceedings. While I do not wish to abandon rules of order, I do hope to do three things:

1. Make sure that the people at the meetings get to see the same documents as the Council Members.

2. If the Council Members received the documents with sufficient time to study them, then any action related to those documents should be discussed, then tabled until the next meeting for further discussion and possible action. Such a procedure will help insure that the matter will be considered not only by the board, but by every person in the room. The desire for "decisive action" should take a back seat to consideration and communication.

3. Encourage public dialog between the council members, between council members and non-coucil members, and even among non-council members, through the chair of course, on any subject that comes to the meeting.

Last, membership on the MAC should not substitute for direct action. County policy is not likely to change as a result of MAC "advice". To the degree the MAC succeeds in effecting the highest standards of local goverment service and the voice of the people, it succeeds. To the degree the MAC thinks it represents the will of the people, it is officious and doomed to fail.

I believe that working together, we can both protect ourselves to some degree from the effects of county policies and pressure our supervisor to provide the services that we paid for and deserve.