Not long before Los Angeles issued its safer at home order to slow the spread of coronavirus in March, City Council President Nury Martinez moved to curtail the number of Council meetings and committee hearings indefinitely. Not long after, the City's various commissions - composed of appointees by Mayor Eric Garcetti - followed suit. Now, a month of silence, business is beginning to resume.
The Los Angeles City Planning Commission is scheduled to meet once again on April 23 - this time via teleconferencing. The Commission, which typically meets twice per month, has not convened since a brief hearing in March 18, where Commissioners voted to continue most items for a month due to the public health emergency.
The Department of City Planning, which announced the meeting, has already held a remote hearing for the Cultural Heritage Commission, and has scheduled additional remote hearings for the City's various Area Planning Commissions and Design Review Boards in the coming weeks.
Click here to learn how to access the upcoming virtual meetings.
Commissions in other cities, such as Santa Monica, are also poised to resume meetings this month via teleconferencing.
Elected bodies across Los Angeles County have turned to teleconferencing and video conferencing platforms such as Zoom to continue meeting during the COVID-19 state of emergency, with varying degrees of success. While the City of Los Angeles has provided audio and video feeds at its meetings thus far, the County Board of Supervisors and Metro Board of Directors have provided audio-only streams, with public comment restricted to e-mail messages which are read aloud by staff members during the hearings.
The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board weighed in on the matter on April 7, arguing that the lack of real-time public participation in these meetings is a violation of the Ralph M. Brown Act.
