Elected officials in Guadalupe recently decided it was time for the Royal Theater Capital Campaign Committee’s final curtain call, less than a year after it was formed.
Appointed by the City Council and dedicated to raising money toward renovating Guadalupe’s historic Royal Theater, the 14-member committee was started in January as a Brown Act body. Over the past nine months, the group hasn’t held a single official hearing that meets the Brown Act’s quorum standards, staff told the council at its Sept. 9 meeting.
Councilmember Whitney Furness—the sole City Council member among the committee’s 14 appointees—clarified that at least one meeting between six members took place. The Brown Act requires at least eight in attendance for a 14-member body.
“We were not informed it was a Brown Act,” Furness told city staff in September, shortly before the council voted 5-0 to dissolve the Capital Campaign Committee.
City Attorney Philip F. Sinco confirmed that he “failed to alert” the council that the Capital Campaign Committee’s structure made it accountable to Brown Act regulations.
“I apologize for my error on that. I don’t want to make any excuses why I thought it might not be a Brown Act body,” Sinco told the council. “I shouldn’t have.”
Sinco said that city staff members recently “met and discussed this conundrum and about what to do,” before recommending that the council disband the Capital Campaign Committee.
As for whether the council should replace the committee with a new body to oversee the city’s Royal Theater fundraising efforts or not, “staff kind of feels that it’s [already] the oversight committee for this project,” Sinco said.
“[Staff] decided that we really don’t want to support a Brown Act body because of the staffing required,” Sinco told the council. “We understand the desire of the community to have an input, and council’s ear, but they can also speak at public meetings such as [City Council meetings]. … But it’s up to the council to decide what to do.”
Sinco described one exception in terms of a new oversight body that staff would support because it falls outside of Brown Act territory. He suggested that the council consider appointing a temporary Royal Theater project oversight board with two City Council members, who can schedule “informal” meetings with city staff, he explained.
“You lose the [Brown Act] exception if the council sets a regular meeting schedule, so you don’t want to do that. It would just be more informal,” Sinco said. “Staff believes it would be rather efficient to have two members of the council working directly with staff members involved.”
Councilmember Furness and Mayor Ariston Julian both voiced their preferences to enact a new Brown Act body instead.
“My opinion is that there needs to be a standardized meeting,” Furness said. “What we are lacking is a regular, transparent meeting/discussion—oversight of the project.”
The September meeting wasn’t the first council hearing where Furness raised transparency concerns about the Royal Theater project. In May, she scrutinized project manager Tom Brandeberry’s accounting practices. In July, Furness said she believed that the only way to get clear info about the project was by asking city staff “quite a bit of pointed questions.”
In response to Sinco’s two-member board proposal, Furness said she worried that could hypothetically exhaust more of staff’s time than going down the Brown Act route with monthly or bimonthly hearings.
“If we have two members of the council meeting with staff not regularly but ‘as needed,’ it would still utilize the same amount of resources if not more by pulling staff into those meetings,” Furness said. “I mean, what if we ended up meeting once a week? For two hours.”
Mayor Julian told staff he would prefer a new five-member oversight committee “meet on a regular basis [as a] Brown Act body.”
The council voted 4-1 to establish the new Brown Act board to oversee the Royal Theater project’s fundraising efforts, limited to five members it plans to appoint at a future council meeting. Councilmember Christina Hernandez dissented.
This article appears in Sep 18 – Sep 25, 2025.
Guadalupe has the most corrupt city I’ve ever lived in. It’s an old boys network who all sit around and pat each other on the backs. We already voted as a city and said we didn’t want to fund this project. The council won’t let it go—it’s a PET PROJECT. We’ve got half our town with crumbling buildings and literally half of every council meeting is about this stupid theater the citizens have ALREADY VOTED THAT WE DON’T want to fund it! What we DO want is crucial safety issues fixed—like lights and a cross walk for kids walking to school across a state highway. A second exit route for an entire neighborhood locked with only one street out —a disaster waiting to happen. We want the buildings that in our downtown to not crumble down and kill us in case of an earthquake, but most of all we want transparency and oversight. This is just the TIP of the corruption around here. We need some county officials to come and audit EVERYTHING. We have codes in the books that only apply to some. If you’re a city employee, you seem to get a pass while the new neighborhood gets the fines. And if you complain, watch out, you literally need to make sure you can defend yourself. Every night we’ve got fireworks and M-80’s being shot off, people park on their front lawns in some parts of town, but the new parts get fined for putting up a fence to cover their garbage cans. It’s crooked. It’s intentional. It needs to stop.