Council members face grilling at breakfast meeting

City Council members might be in for a grilling of sorts when they attend Wednesday’s monthly meeting of the Breakfast Club, a collection of young professionals from twenty-somethings to forty-somethings who gather to network and celebrate Modesto and its environs.

The breakfast meeting is at Greens on Tenth, 953 10th St. It starts at 7 a.m., and costs $5.

Breakfast Club member Kate Trompetter said in an email that the room will be divided into council districts, and the breakfast will give members the chance to speak with the council member who represents them. Modesto elects its six council members by district. Only the mayor is elected citywide.

“Many of our attendees didn’t even know who their rep (council member) was,” Trompetter said in her email. “There will not be a panel or an opportunity for the council to be addressed as a group or for them to address the Breakfast Club as a group.”

Though the city posted the agenda for the meeting on its website out of an abundance of caution, the gathering falls outside of the scope of the Brown Act, the state law that governs the meetings of public bodies, said California Newspapers Publishers Association legal counsel Nikki Moore.

Elected officials can attend meetings organized by others to address local concerns, such as neighborhood meetings or town halls, according to the CNPA, as long as the officials do not gather among themselves to discuss public business.

This story was originally published May 1, 2017 at 4:49 PM with the headline "Council members face grilling at breakfast meeting."