A San Diego city board hasn’t met for nearly a year. It took a Documenter to find out why.

For nearly a year the City of San Diego’s Citizens Advisory Board on Police/Community Relations has not held a meeting, unable to muster enough members to form a necessary quorum.

But you wouldn’t know that by reading the city’s website.

There, the last listed meeting is from July 17 — eight months ago. A link brings up an undated notice on board letterhead, saying that the meeting was adjourned until Aug. 21. 

After that, nothing. 

It took a participant of inewsource’s Documenters program to find out the status of the 15-member board, which was inaugurated in 1990, went dormant nine years later, and was revived in 2016. 

The board is scheduled to meet monthly. But when the Documenter could not find an agenda or meeting location on the website for the February meeting, she contacted Chida Warren-Darby, the city’s director of the Office of Boards and Commissions. 

In an email exchange, Warren-Darby said that the board “has been unable to meet quorum for almost a year and is undergoing some structural changes. This is why the website has not been updated to reflect an upcoming meeting.”

The board was formed as a way to open lines of communication between the San Diego Police Department and communities across the city. It has also come up with policy recommendations, most recently in 2019 when it unveiled 30 recommendations for fostering better relations. The department ended up adopting more than half of them. 

Under the state open meetings law, known as the Brown Act, government entities have to post an agenda for a regular meeting 72 hours in advance, in a place that is accessible to the public.

In a later interview, Warren-Darby — who was a candidate in a special election for the District 4 seat on the City Council but as of Monday was running a distant second — said not enough members to form a quorum were showing up to attend the advisory board meetings. Now, the city is weighing whether to dissolve the board entirely, she said.

While there is no specific provision in the law dealing with canceled meetings, it is generally accepted best practice to post a notice of cancellation. 

Asked about why there is no notice on the board website stating meetings are not being held, Warren-Darby responded, “What would you post?” Later she acknowledged that the city could have posted a basic statement that meetings were canceled.

In fact the board did just that for its meeting for May 15, posting a notice on the website that the meeting was canceled. No reason was given.

inewsource started the San Diego Documenters program earlier this year. Community members receive free training and then are paid to attend underreported public meetings. Through a partnership with San Diego State University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies, Documenters will cover about 40 public meetings over the next two months.

Last month, another Documenter found that the Policy and Funding Committee for the Commission for Arts and Culture for the city of San Diego also canceled its meeting without a notice. 

At its next meeting, the committee had a presentation from a deputy city attorney about the Brown Act.