Marin County supervisors have decided to do away with the Human Rights Commission, an institution in place for nearly six decades.
The decision this month to “sunset” the panel was part of a larger re-evaluation of the 59 boards and commissions. The supervisors also approved the elimination of the Architectural Commission, the Fair Advisory Board and two appeals boards.
Several of the boards were finding it hard to retain members and were largely inactive, but that was not the case with the Human Rights Commission.
The commission, however, had become the target of the county’s two most active critics, Rodrigo Izquierdo and Eva Chrysanthe. Izquierdo and Chrysanthe regularly use public open time requirements under the Brown Act to speak multiple times at Board of Supervisors’ meetings.
Over recent months, they subjected the Human Rights Commission to withering criticism with no response from its members. The duo also began speaking at meetings of the commission itself.
At the conclusion of the commission’s meeting on Dec. 12, when Izquierdo and Chrysanthe each spoke nine times, there might have been some kind of conflict between Chrysanthe and Jeremy Portje, the commission’s chair. Both allege they had been shoved by the other.
At the supervisors’ meeting on Dec. 19, County Executive Matthew Hymel announced that a decision had been made to “pause our Human Rights Commission meetings.” The pause would prove to be permanent.
Responding to the supervisors’ decision to sunset the commission, Izqueirdo said, “It was very non-functional from the get-go mainly because they did not want to follow the Brown Act and also because it was overrepresented by Novato residents.”
Chrysanthe said, “There is no way that I will be able to address what went wrong with the Human Rights Commission in two minutes. I was screamed at; I was shoved; I was spat on; and ultimately I was assaulted by the chairman at the December meeting.”
Portje, in an email, said, “Eva has consistently stood before the Board of Supervisors and shared many two minute fables on public record during public comments. I am shocked by her claims of being screamed at, spat on and assaulted by me. They are completely false.”
“I have a pending case of assault/battery against her,” he added.
Curtis Aikens, who was appointed to the commission in 2021, said he does not think it should be disbanded.
“We just need to be better equipped to do our work,” he said. “So should every other commission that is part of the county.”
Commissioner Jason Sarris, who became an advocate for homeless residents after living on the street himself, wrote in an email: “I think a major reason the county shut down the Human Rights Commission is because the meetings were becoming unsafe for the commissioners, county staff and members of the audience due to Ms Chrysanthe starting fights, stalking attendees and thoroughly disrupting the meetings.”
Aikens said there was dissent among the commission’s members before the two critics started attending meetings.
“We had become a dysfunctional family, for lack of a better term,” Aikens said. “Eva and Rodrigo were the last straw because there was so much going on behind the scenes. Eva and Rodrigo were able to throw enough mud that it just covered up everything we were trying to do.”
Aikens said the commission lost three chairs in a six- or seven-month period, and some of the remaining commissioners were lacking on parliamentary procedure.
“We lost too much historical knowledge over too short a time to be a really effective body the last couple years of our existence,” Aikens said.
The controversy is not the commission’s first. It remained idle for nearly a year after five female members resigned in 2014. Several of the women said they felt their proposals were being disregarded.
County supervisors required the three remaining male commissioners to reapply for their jobs, and they declined. As a result, a whole new set of commissioners was appointed.
No mention was made of strife within the commission during the meeting when the supervisors approved eliminating the advisory body.
“We would like to focus our efforts on the successful launch of the new sheriff’s oversight commission, and given the overlap of focus, we would like to sunset the Human Rights Commission,” Carla Kacmar, the county’s assistant clerk of the board, told supervisors.
Dan Eilerman, assistant county executive, said he wanted to “applaud the hard work of the Human Rights Commission.”
“They did spend a lot of time in the last two years helping to inform the setup of the new sheriff’s oversight commission,” he said.
One of Chrysanthe’s chief complaints about the commission was that it failed to share her pessimistic appraisal of the process to create the sheriff’s oversight panel.
According to the county ordinance passed when the Human Right Commission was reorganized in 2015, its mission was “to promote a community based on social justice, with equality for all, and to eliminate discrimination based on race, religion, color, age, ancestry, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, place of birth, national origin or disability.”
Supervisor Stephanie Moulton-Peters said that much of the work that the commission was created to do has been taken over by the Marin County Office of Equity.
“That’s where government was; we’ve moved beyond that now,” Moulton-Peters said. “This is a natural evolution of county government.”
Supervisor Eric Lucan, who served with Supervisor Dennis Rodoni on the subcommittee that recommended eliminating the commission, said, “Sunsets are not necessarily a bad thing. They imply a new day is coming.”