First District Councilman says he’ll post his appointment calendar online

PHOTO by JOHN GILHOOLEY

Don’t even waste your time asking Robert Garcia what he’s doing on his first full day—or any other day, for that matter‚ as the 1st District’s representative on the Long Beach City Council. Just go online to robertgarcia.com. It’s all there.

Garcia’s first act after his swearing-in ceremony Tuesday night as the city’s newest—and at age 31, its youngest ever—council member was to post his appointment calendar on his Web site. The calendars of his staff members are up there, too.

“These calendars will let people know who I’m meeting with, when I’m meeting with them and what I’m meeting with them about,” says Garcia. “The same information will be available about my staff; I think that’s just as important in a city with part-time council members, where full-time staff members do so much of the work.”

Garcia’s small move marks a potentially consequential shift in the debate about government transparency in Long Beach, one of the state’s few major cities without an ordinance that regulates lobbyists. Just last November the city council voted, 7-2, against a proposal that would have forced lobbyists to register and report their contacts with city officials. Only Gerrie Schipske and Bonnie Lowenthal—Garcia’s predecessor, now gone to the California assembly—voted in favor of the ordinance.

Did we say this is a small move?

“I think it’s a huge step in open government, one that begins a new philosophy about where Long Beach is going,” says Garcia. “The future of Long Beach is progressive, and that means giving residents access to city hall. Putting my calendar online is a move toward balancing things out to break this old-boys’ network that needs to be broken.”

The city has a long and infamous reputation for behind-the-scenes dealings and sweet treatment of insiders, and prominent monuments to the practice are everywhere—from the Queen Mary, Aquarium of the Pacific, the Pike at Rainbow Harbor and the about-to-open Residence Inn on Queensway Drive, to the out-of-balance sheets of the Long Beach Museum of Art and the recent lopsided leases and land swaps city officials have negotiated with developer Tom Dean.

Interestingly, Garcia’s solution is the one preferred by local lobbyists, some of whom have been a part of the old-boys’ equation.

“All city officials need to do is open their calendars and put them on the Internet,” lobbyist Mike Murchison—whose client list of heavy-hitters includes Dean—told a meeting of the council’s Election Oversight Committee last Aug. 5. “That would solve the problem beautifully without adding another layer of bureaucracy—and forcing taxpayers to pick up the tab.”

Garcia insists the lobbyists’ perspective played no part in his decision.

“The first time I thought about the lobbyist connection,” he says, “is when you mentioned it.”

Diane Ripley, who prefers to describe her lobbying work as community outreach, says she appreciates Garcia’s move to open his calendar on a professional and philosophical basis.

“I think it’s a really responsible position to take,” she says. “Councilman Garcia recognizes it’s up to elected officials to be answerable to their constituents. Publishing my calendar? What would that do? It doesn’t really create transparency for the public official. To me, that’s skirting the issue.”

Previously, some council members have objected to publishing their calendars over fear for their privacy and out of concern that they might overburden their staffs. “Now that I’m going to be a mom, alone, living with a child, I now feel differently,” 2nd District Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal said last summer, shortly after separating from her husband. “I don’t want people to know where [my son] is. I don’t want them to know that he goes to 49er Camp at x-hour, you know? All of that is on my calendar now—my son’s doctor appointments, dentist appointments—so that my staff is aware that if I’m not available, it’s because I’m doing that. So that’s a concern I have.”

Said ex-council member Bonnie Lowenthal: “Quite frankly, it’s quite burdensome for council members to provide that kind of detailed information.”

Schipske was doing a primitive version of Garcia’s reporting in 2007, when she used her blog (schipskedistrict5journal.com) to post a weekly list of the meetings she’d attended. But she stopped—“Nobody else was doing it,” she explained, “and it was very time consuming for me to type in everything by hand”—and has since focused her efforts on a lobbyist registration ordinance, which she says she will ask the city council to put on the ballot for the 2010 election so citizens can vote on it.

Garcia says he envisions a more expansive, proactive version of what Schipske was doing—and, hopefully, one that is a little less labor intensive.

“The ideal is that someone will be able to go to my Web site, click on the calendar and see the same thing we see in my council office—an advance, up-to-the-minute list of my appointments that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” he says. “It will start on my personal Web site, but I intend to transfer it to the city site as soon as we can figure out the technology. It’s definitely a commitment of time and resources, but I know it’s the right thing to do.”

Garcia chuckles a little bit.

“Look, this is not a new idea,” he says. “It’s just a new idea to Long Beach.”

As proof and as an example of what he has in mind, Garcia points to the Web site of the city of San Jose (sanjoseca.gov/council.asp), where residents need only to click on the word “calendar” right below the photo of the mayor or city council to see what their elected officials will be up to, sometimes months in advance.

There are limits to the disclosure, says Garcia, and the effort may test the limits of his staff.

“People are not going to know if I’m going to get a haircut,” he says—an interesting example for the always well-coifed councilman. “No one is going to know about my doctor’s appointments. Everyone has a right to privacy.

“I agree that it’s definitely a commitment of time and resources, too. But I know it’s the right thing to do—and I’m going to get it done. Old Long Beach has had its heyday, and this is my way of marking a new day.”

Tags: city council, Gerrie Schipske, Long Beach, online calendar, Robert Garcia