By Zelda Bronstein : 48hills – excerpt
Crucial planning decisions are made behind closed-doors, with Yimby stakeholders—and the public can’t even get the basic records.
Ben Metcalf directed the California Department of Housing and Community Development from November 2015 to September 2019. In February 2021, Metcalf, now managing director of the Terner Center of Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, said that the state’s new housing laws had given his former employer “the potential to be moving like the CIA. Most of the time, HCD’s work is done below the waterline.”
He meant that as a tribute to HCD’s effectiveness.
Covert operations are usually hidden from the public. But three months later, HCD advertised its penchant for secrecy. As it prepared to update the statewide housing plan in May 2021, the agency invited members of the public to share their views of California’s housing policies via a series of online “listening sessions.” Then it refused to divulge what it had heard, claiming that to do so would violate privacy.
It appears that the privacy that was allegedly at risk was HCD’s. In response to my Public Records Act request to see the messages entered in Chat and staff notes from the meetings, HCD stated that those records “contain confidential information and it has been determined that the public interest in not disclosing this confidential information clearly outweighs the public interest in its disclosure. This confidential information is exempt from disclosure under deliberative process exemption set forth in Government Code section 6255 and these records have been withheld. Megan Kirkeby, Deputy Director of the Housing Policy Development Division is responsible for withholding these records.”… (more)
Read the rest of this online and comment if you can. The more we see of these Sacramento Politicians’ efforts to remove public participation in government matters, the more we need to pry. Many books and articles have been writing detailing what and how they are doing it, but so far no one has come up with a reason why. They do our elected representatives spend so much time and energy removing public oversight and review of their work? Who determined the government should decide how we live and what is the end game? Let’s keep on watching and searching for the motive behind the lies and the coverups. Are they just keeping us busy watching their housing manipulations what something much more nefarious is going on?