Los Angeles City Council, Municipal Ethics

I Filed A Complaint Against Joey Buckets Staffer Amy Gebert In August 2020 — Which Apparently Flipped Her Out So Much That She Started Emailing Me Every Week Or Two Using An Alternate Account Designed — Unsuccessfully — To Conceal Her Identity — About How My Request Would Be Ready In A Week Or Two — And Then Cancelling And Postponing — She Did This Eight Times In Just A Few Weeks — Which Is About Twelve Times As Often As She Did It Before The Complaint — Then Stopped Abruptly In December 2020 — And Still Hasn’t Produced The Damn Records — So I Filed Another Complaint Against Her With The Ethics Commission — This One For Retaliating Against Me For Filing The First Complaint

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Ultimately this post is about this complaint that I filed with the Ethics Commission today regarding CD15 staffer Amy Gebert’s retaliation against me for complaining about her last August. There is also a transcription below.


Flashback to those lazy hazy crazy days of Summer 2020, those days of COVID and ethics complaints against CD15 staffer Amy Gebert!1 Well, after I filed that complaint, Gebert flipped out and, using a fake email address,2 started emailing me every week or two telling me that my request would be ready in a week or two and then, on the last day, emailing me again to tell me that the production date was postponed.

Obviously she was doing this in response to my having filed a complaint against her. She started about a week after I filed it, and proceeded to send me 8 emails over the next few weeks at a rate almost 12 times more frequently than she had in the year prior to the complaint.

As obviously she was doing it to irritate me. What possible legitimate reason could she have for repeatedly lying about when the records, which by the way I still don’t have, would be ready? Sure, she could be withholding them to hide the criminal conspiracy conducted by her boss, Joey “Joe Buscaino” Buckets, but that has nothing to do with this compulsive notification/denotification.

And doing things to irritate people because they file complaints against you with the Ethics Commission is, it turns out, a separate violation of the Municipal Ethics Ordinance at LAMC §49.5.4(B), which tells us that:

City officials and agency employees shall not use or threaten to use any official authority or influence to effect any action as a reprisal against another person who reports a possible violation of law to the Ethics Commission or another governmental entity.

And so today I filed yet another complaint against Gebert with the Ethics Commission. You can read the complete complaint here, and there’s a transcription of the complaint, but without the exhibits, below.3

Transcription of the complaint

Synopsis

  1. In August 2020 I filed a complaint with the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission against CD15 staffer Amy Gebert for violating LAMC 49.5.5. Within a few days of my filing the complaint Gebert uncharacteristically sent me a repetitive series of emails repeatedly announcing and cancelling production dates for emails responsive to a request for public records.

  2. I argue here that Gebert did this as a reprisal against me for my complaint to the Ethics Commission and that this constitutes a violation of LAMC 49.5.4. I further argue that by misusing her official position to effect this reprisal against me, Gebert also violated LAMC 49.5.5.

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Laws, policies, and rules

  1. The Los Angeles Municipal Code at 49.5.4(B) states:

    City officials and agency employees shall not use or threaten to use any official authority or influence to effect any action as a reprisal against another person who reports a possible violation of law to the Ethics Commission or another governmental entity.

  2. The Los Angeles Municipal Code at 49.5.5(A) states in part that:

    City officials, agency employees, …shall not misuse or attempt to misuse their positions …to create or attempt to create a private advantage or disadvantage, financial or otherwise, for any person.

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Background

  1. In June 2019 I requested some records from CD15.

  2. On August 27, 2020 I filed a complaint with the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission (“CEC”) against CD15 staffer Amy Gebert for violating LAMC 49.5.5 with respect to my June 2019 request for records. This complaint is appended below for reference. See on page .

  3. My main allegations against Gebert in that complaint were her purposeful stalling of production of records responsive to my June 2019 request1 and her refusal to produce emails in any manner other than by printing them on paper and scanning the printouts to PDFs.

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Facts

  1. On September 4, 2020, just a week after I filed my first complaint against Gebert, she produced another installment of records, which she characterised as responsive to my June 2019 request.2 At that time Gebert stated that she would send another installment of records on October 2, 2020. See on page below.

  2. On October 2, 2020, rather than sending more records, Gebert emailed me to say that she had not finished reviewing the current tranche of records, and would produce on October 16, 2020 rather than October 2, 2020. See on page below.

  3. On October 16, 2020 Gebert emailed to say the records would be finished on October 23, 2020. She then proceeded to send a series of emails, each on the very day she’d previously promised to produce records, extending the production date from October 23 to October 30 to November 13 to November 20 to December 4 to December 11 to January 14, 2021. See on page , on page , on page , on page , on page , on page , and on page .

  4. Since then neither Gebert nor anyone else at CD15 has communicated with me with respect to this request.

  5. Between June 2019 and September 3, 2020 Gebert sent me a total of three emails related to production dates for this request.

  6. Although these emails are apparently from an account known as CD15.cpra@lacity.org, they were nevertheless sent by Gebert, as seen in the metadata. See for instance on page below.

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Conclusions

Gebert violated LAMC 49.5.4 by using her official authority to effect a series of actions as reprisals against me

Gebert lied repeatedly to me about production dates

  1. Between September 4, 2020 and December 11, 2020 Gebert extended her production deadline eight times. She sent each extension notice precisely on the due date she’d announced in the previous notice.

  2. If Gebert were acting in good faith it’s extremely unlikely that she’d be wrong about her estimated production deadline eight times in a row.

  3. If Gebert were acting in good faith it’s inconceivable that her first estimate in the current series, October 2, 2020, could be wrong by close to five months at this point without her having completed any of the review as of February 2021.

  4. If she’d completed any of the review she would have had records to produce by at least one of her extended deadlines, and yet she did not. Therefore she either hasn’t completed reviewing any records after September 4, 2020 or else she’s withholding them from production even though they’re reviewed.

  5. Therefore either Gebert lied when she said repeatedly that she expected the records to be ready on a given day because she didn’t actually expect them to be ready or else because they are ready and she said that they were not.

Gebert’s frequent post-complaint notifications were uncharacteristic

  1. As shown above in , Gebert sent me eight notifications of changed production dates between September 4, 2020 and December 11, 2020. This is a rate of 0.082 notifications per day.

  2. Between June 30, 2019 and September 3, 2020 Gebert sent only three notifications. This is a rate of 0.007 notifications per day.

  3. Therefore one week after I filed a complaint against her, Gebert increased her notification rate to 11.7 times its pre-complaint level.

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Gebert’s repeated extensions and bad faith production date estimates were intended as a reprisal against me

  1. As argued above in , one week after I filed my complaint Gebert markedly increased the frequency at which she set and then cancelled production dates, which is evidence that the two events are linked.

  2. As argued above in , Gebert had no legitimate reason for repeatedly setting and postponing production dates.

  3. Since Gebert had no legitimate reason for her actions she either effected them for no reason or for an illegitimate reason. The first option isn’t plausible, so Gebert must have had one or more illegitimate reasons for her actions.

  4. It’s possible, even likely, that Gebert has illegitimate reasons for withholding access to records that are independent of me. However, no such reasons exist for her repeated notifications and revisions.

  5. Therefore her repeated notifications and production date revisions were effected as a reprisal against me.

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Gebert used her official authority to effect these actions intended as a reprisal

  1. As shown above in , Gebert sent the messages from the City of Los Angeles email address CD15.cpra@lacity.org. Thus she was replying as someone responsible for CD15’s CPRA policy, which is official authority.

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Gebert violated LAMC 49.5.5 by misusing City resources to effect an action as a reprisal against me

  1. As shown above in , Gebert used her official authority to effect the action of sending a series of emails to me as a reprisal in violation of LAMC 49.5.4.

  2. Illegal actions by City officials constitute a misuse of their official position.

  3. Reprisals against a person are intended to create a private disadvantage for that person.

  4. Therefore Gebert misused her official position to attempt to create a private disadvantage for me.

  5. Gebert violated LAMC 49.5.5 by using her offical authority to effect a series of actions intended as a reprisal.

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Requested Action

  1. I ask that the Ethics Commission investigate this matter and, if appropriate, sanction Amy Gebert for her ongoing violations of the Los Angeles Municipal Code.

Footnotes
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  1. Which is not close to complete almost two years later.↩

  2. This is phrased oddly because Gebert produces dozens of emails scanned into a single PDF, not text searchable, with individual emails often broken across multiple PDFs, so it’s not usually possible to determine why she chose to produce a given email.↩

  1. And beer too, of course. H/T Nat King Cole, a hero of this blog!
  2. It’s not really fake in any sensible sense, I’m just using extreme language for rhetorical purposes, as is perfectly reasonable to do. She emailed me using the email address CD15.cpra@lacity.org, which is something she made up just for me. She doesn’t use it for CPRA requests with her more favored correspondents, like approximately everyone who’s not me.
  3. I made the html straight from the TeX source of the complaint, so it’s slightly flawed in places having to do with the exhibits, which I omitted from this version because there are a lot of them. But the PDF itself is complete and not flawed like this.
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