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Angel DeFazio, who got a trespassing citation for recording a Public Utilities Commission hearing with a video camera, called to talk to me about the open meeting law.
The 62-year-old Las Vegas resident is a reporter for Vegas Voice, a newspaper for seniors, although the Las Vegas Review-Journal called her a ‘gadfly’ in the headline of the story linked above.
I didn’t know Angel before I talked with her Tuesday, but she sounds like a firebrand who takes very seriously her self-appointed duty to record meetings of the PUC.
“The police,” she said, “were wonderful.”
They disappointed her, though, by not handcuffing her so her arrest would be more newsworthy. “I asked them, ‘How are you going to handcuff my video camera?'”
As a reporter, DeFazio sends what she finds out to an editor at Vegas Voice who decides whether to do something with it.
But Angel also told me she speaks out during public-comment periods often at PUC meetings and has been highly critical of the commissioners, administration and anybody else she thinks isn’t giving the public a fair shake.
Gadfly — an annoying person who provokes others into action — seems like as good a description as any.
She’s the reason the PUC asked people not to wear perfume to its meetings, because she has allergies. She calls herself an “environmental activist for indoor air quality.”
The allergies are also one reason she video-records PUC meetings. She can turn on the camera and leave the room if the air is bothering her, then watch the recording later.
In Monday’s incident, though, DeFazio refused to turn off her camera when told to do so by Commissioner David Noble, who was presiding over a contested case. These are quasi-judicial hearings which are handled much like a courtroom, with evidence and testimony and rules of procedure.
That was the justification given to DeFazio — in advance, apparently — by a PUC attorney, who was relying on the Nevada Supreme Court’s rules for electronic coverage of courts. Under the court rules, media need to apply for permission to have recording devices in a courtroom.
I was part of the committee that recommended the updated rules to the Supreme Court, and I know the difficulty we had in deciding who was a journalist and what kind of restrictions needed to be placed on recording devices, including phones that could easily be slipped into a pocket. Ultimately, in a courtroom, the judge has authority over everything that happens.
However, when I was contacted Tuesday and told of DeFazio’s confrontation, I scrambled to come up with anything that would give a PUC commissioner the same kind of authority in a contested case. You can gauge my uncertainty by my quote in the story, where I throw in the catch-all “not that I’m aware of” excuse.
I did know NRS 241, the open meeting law, does specify that “quasi-judicial” proceedings are covered, other than exceptions for the Parole Board and Commission on Judicial Discipline. But I’m not familiar enough with the Administrative Procedures Act or the PUC’s raft of regulations to say such power doesn’t exist somewhere.
Still, the question remains whether DeFazio had a right to record the meeting, or whether Noble was within his authority to shut her down.
I still haven’t found anything to back up the PUC’s assertions that it can act under courtroom protocol, rather than the open meeting law.
And even under the open-meeting statute, could DeFazio have been ordered to stop recording?
According to her, and others in the hearing room, there was no disruption. She has recorded many times before under similar circumstances. Others apparently recorded in the room when the confrontation took place.
The biggest disruption, it seems, was in telling DeFazio to stop recording.
It’s not unusual for public officials and bureaucrats to lose patience with outspoken critics, especially regulars who show up meeting after meeting and repeat their diatribes. They can be exasperating.
For professional reporters, it would be unthinkable to lay into the city council during public-comment time and then sit down to cover the meeting. (Although I expect it has happened.)
But that’s the beauty of the open meeting law. It doesn’t matter if DeFazio is a reporter, a gadfly, neither or both.
There is no guarantee in the statute that a person can record a public meeting, because there doesn’t need to be.