Someone needs to clue in the folks in charge of the South Santa Clara Valley Memorial District about the Brown Act. And its legal obligations to veterans. And basic bookkeeping. And the Internet.

The small veterans memorial district in South County, already chastised last year by the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury, landed in even more hot water with another oversight agency for violating open meeting laws, among other things.

The county’s Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) submitted an annual service review to the Rules Committee’s public record for a number of districts under its purview, including the memorial district.

“The district appears to have a lack of understanding of what constitutes a meeting that requires public notice,” the LAFCo review says. “The Brown Act requires that meetings involving a majority of a legislative body must be open to the public and must satisfy certain meeting notice and agenda requirements. Four members of the district’s Board of Directors met with LAFCo staff and its consultants in September 2012 without properly noticing the meeting.”

Oops.

LAFCo followed up on the 2012 grand jury audit, which, in addition to pointing out those Brown Act violations, found that board members tried to illegally oust one of their elected peers. The district also lacks a mission statement and guiding blueprint for how to provide veteran services to its constituents—the sole legal purpose for its existence. It has no director, no website and no bylaws. Its only job is to provide services to veterans, but few veterans in its jurisdiction even know it exists.

Financially, things are a little shady, too. The district never itemized expenditures in its $118,000 annual budget when reporting it to the state. The district has no employees, an elected board, a semi-volunteer secretary who makes a $150 monthly stipend and a veterans hall in Gilroy to rent out for profit or use to hold events for active and retired military men and women.

For whatever reason, the district has yet to get its financial house in order—even months after the Grand Jury audit, which it has yet to fully respond to, and even now that it’s been put on blast again by LAFCo.

LAFCo included reviews of five other special districts in the report, which you can read in its entirety here.

More items of note from Rules and Open Government Committee agenda for March 20, 2013:

• David Wall’s approach to government is anything but orthodox. In his perfect world, graffiti vandalism merits a Singapore-style caning and seizure of their cars, homes and bank accounts. Illegal immigrants would get deported and the homeless immediately dispersed from their makeshift settlement by the Guadalupe River. (“Camp Chuck Sam,” as he calls it, named after Mayor Chuck Reed and Councilmember Sam Liccardo.) Sewer rates would drop and developers would say goodbye to tax-cut incentives to build in downtown.

Wall, a registered Democrat, has a lot of ideas and he’s not shy about sharing them, judging by the several letters a week he writes for the Rules Committee’s public record. So it’s no surprise, then, that the vocal overall-clad anti-Reed iconoclast filed papers to run for the county supervisor seat left vacant by George Shirakawa Jr., as well as the 2014 mayoral race in San Jose.

It’s not his first try at politics. The San Jose resident and retired city employee ran against four others for the District 3 City Council seat in 1998, garnering 3.5 percent of the votes (257). Cindy Chavez won the race with 46.1 percent (3,420 votes).

Not one to limit his options, Wall ran that same year for the San Jose Unified School District Area 2 trustee seat against incumbent Rich Garcia. Again, Wall lost, but not as badly, pulling in 27 percent (2,200 votes) against Garcia’s 73 percent (5,952).

Wall couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. But give his passion for public discourse, we expect to hear from him soon. 

• San Jose can expect a 5-percent cut to federal housing and community block grants thanks to the sequester. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sent a letter to the city warning them of the local impact of the $85 billion reduction in federal funding.

• Santa Cruz Police Chief Kevin Vogel sent a letter to San Jose police thanking them for their support in the wake of the shooting that left two Santa Cruz officers dead. Sgt. Loran “Butch” Baker and Detective Elizabeth Butler were shot to death during a routine questioning last month. San Jose officers went to the Santa Cruz department right after the shooting, Vogel says, and offered their support. The public memorial for the fallen officers was held at the HP Pavilion and dozens of San Jose officers helped, in some way, at the ceremony.

“There are no words to adequately describe the tremendous feeling I had when you and your staff walked into the Administration Division offices of my department on that day and you offered your words of support and expression of kindness to me,” Vogel writes to San Jose’s Acting Police Chief Larry Esquivel.

• The city’s Elections Commission will hold a meeting later this month to collect public input as it tries to update the city’s ethics and election code, called Title 12 in the city charter. The commission wants council members to submit their input about the proposed changes in writing instead of with the public at the March 28 meeting to avoid any Brown Act violations.

WHAT: San Jose Rules and Open Government Committee meeting
WHEN: 2pm Wednesday
WHERE: City Hall, 200 E. Santa Clara St., San Jose
INFO: City Clerk, 408.535.1260