The first meeting of a committee charged with helping determine the fate of the Fairfax-San Anselmo Children’s Center was delayed due to an alleged Brown Act violation.

Bill Madsen, a Ross Valley resident, filed the challenge on Dec. 6. He alleged that the Ross Valley School District board’s vote on Nov. 9 to approve a slate of seven committee members to look into the future of the district-owned property that houses the center was a violation of the state public meeting law.

He said there was no announcement of the names, discussion or explanation of the slate’s qualifications prior to the vote by trustees. Specifically, the board called for public comment on a resolution that contained the slate of members, but didn’t read out the names or discuss them before asking the public to comment, according to Madsen.

“The call for public comment was met by confusion,” Madsen said. “None of the relevant material had been presented yet for the public to comment on.” The board then approved the slate but didn’t post the names on the screen until someone in the audience asked who was selected, according to Madsen.

Ross Valley School District superintendent Marci Trahan said there was nothing in the Brown Act that required discussion on specific attachments to the agenda— in this case, the attachment being the list of names. The board voted 5 to 0 on Dec. 14 to affirm that their approval of the slate was in order and that no Brown Act Violation had taken place.

“All of the rules of the Brown Act were followed,” she said. “This delay was unexpected.”

The real property advisory committee, which will decide whether the child care center property could be declared as surplus, had scheduled its first meeting for the week of Nov. 28.

Due to Madsen’s demand letter to “cure or correct” the alleged violation, a 30-day pause was necessary to address the issue, Trahan said. She said the delay would work against the Aug. 31 deadline that the district has set to complete a potential sale of the center property back to the center’s operators.

“We as the district are doing everything we can to secure this transaction in a timely manner,” Trahan said.

Madsen, in his demand letter, said the incident “may seem small, (but) it is part of a larger pattern of questionable behavior by the school board and the administration concerning their adherence to the Brown Act” regarding the children’s center.

The school district owns the center property, located in Fairfax, and leases it on a month-to-month basis to the center operators. In March, the center operators asked for a long-term lease so they could apply for grants to make improvements.

In May, the district’s attorney, Terry Tao, told trustees that the center needed up to $8 million in safety and code improvements. Without those, he advised trustees to decline a long-term lease and evict the center to avoid personal liability in case of emergency or disaster at the center.

The district and the trustees declined to follow Tao’s advice, but it still triggered months of controversy from the community and center supporters. In September, the district approved a timeline to sell the center property to its tenants by the Aug. 31 deadline.

On Dec. 14, however, critics said the selection of the advisory committee members on Nov. 9 was not handled with enough transparency.

“You buried the lede,” said Ross Valley education activist Lisa Canin. “Who’s on the committee? You couldn’t have been more opaque.”

Canin said the board did not talk about how the names were chosen and which of the seven required criteria each person met.

“You may not have violated the Brown Act, but you could have been more transparent on their qualifications,” she said.

Madsen in his demand letter said that he could not find the list of names posted in the agenda packet before the meeting on Nov. 9.

According to Trahan, she didn’t attach the resolution with the list of names to the online agenda until 3:17 p.m. on Nov. 9, the day of the meeting. That was because she was waiting for the last person who met the final criteria to agree to the committee appointment.

The final list was sent to the trustees at 3:22 p.m., Trahan said. The meeting began at 7 p.m. and the full list was included in the packet by the start of the meeting, she added.

“The Brown Act does not require that other attachments or documents be posted 72 hours in advance,” Trahan said.

Board president Shelley Hamilton said she had been expecting to approve a slate of members, and not expecting to discuss individual names at the meeting.

“All the board members had looked at the materials and we knew the slate,” Hamilton said later. “I didn’t think we were approving the members one by one.”

Hamilton said the advisory committee would likely reschedule its first meeting sometime in January.