After a bunch of incredibly vigorous argument at the hearing last month, for which Judge Mitchell Beckloff did not prepare a written tentative ruling, he has issued his final ruling. Get a copy of it here, and other pleadings in the case here. Read on for transcribed selections, which I am not commenting on at all until every part of the case is resolved, because I’m not really competent to do so, but I wanted to publish this because it’s important, at least to me.
Continue reading Fashion District BID CPRA Lawsuit News! — Judge Mitchell Beckloff Files Order Denying My Petition In Part And Granting In Part — Invalidates Some Of BID’s Exemption Claims — Which Is A Win — Also Orders New Search In Response To One Of My Requests — Denies Some Other Stuff — Including My Request For Declaratory Relief — Does Not Rule On The Question Of Whether BID Board Members Using Private Email Accounts Are Subject To The CPRA
Tag Archives: California Public Records Act
News About My CPRA Suit Against The City Of Los Angeles Concerning Emails Between CD1 And LAPD — The City Has Abandoned Its Exemption Claims And Provided More Than 200 Pages Of Records — Which Is Good News On The Prevailing Party Front — And At Least One Of The Newly Released Emails Is Exceedingly Important — Not To Mention Appalling — Shows Gil Cedillo’s Deputy District Director Jose Rodriguez Calling In A Homeless Encampment Sweep — In February 2019 — At The Explicit Behest Of Sociopathic Developer Trammell Crow — Because The Mere Presence Of Displaceable Homeless Human Beings Was Interfering With A Project Schedule — Senior Vice President And Failed Screen Actor Alex Valente Has A Lot To Answer For — As Does Gil Freaking Cedillo — And Jose Rodriguez — And Everyone Else Involved In This Abuse Of Municipal Power
There are two parts to today’s story. First, recall that last month I was forced by the arbitrary, pointless, and utterly inscrutable intransigence of Gil Cedillo‘s Senior Policy Deputy Mel Ilomin to file yet another writ petition against the City of Los Angeles seeking to enforce compliance with the California Public Records Act. And I have some excellent news about this, which is that yesterday the City completely abandoned its indefensible exemption claims and produced more than 200 pages of material responsive to the request at issue. It came to me in two PDFs, which you can get copies of here:
You might recall that Ilomin, completely backstopped by ought-to-know-better Deputy City Attorney Strefan Fauble, had claimed that every single one of these emails was exempt due to that putative deliberative process nonsense that the City of Los Angeles loves so well. And I won’t belabor the details, but if you read through the yield, you’ll see that this exemption claim was entirely unfounded, indefensible, just utter nonsense. For instance, a nontrivial number of these emails are widely published announcements that there will be mobile showers available on various dates at Lincoln Park which, whatever the hell they may be, aren’t exempt from production under any theory acceptable to even the marginally sane.
And there’s some other reasonably interesting material in there, about some of which I might write at some point. But there is also one exceedingly important record, which is this February 2019 email conversation between Cedillo’s Deputy District Director Jose Rodriguez and a long list of LAPD officers, LAHSA staffers, and others, scheduling a sweep of homeless encampments along Llewellyn Street in Chinatown for the explicitly stated reason that they were impeding construction on a huge housing development owned by the Trammell Crow Company, done at the request of Trammell Crow’s senior vice president Alex Valente.
Now, you might recall an instance where an encampment was swept for no better reason than that Eric Garcetti was making a political appearance in the area later. This incident was reported in the Los Angeles Times and evoked the following quasi-denial from Garcetti’s spokesman Alex Comisar, who said it did “not reflect the mayor’s approach to interacting with Angelenos experiencing homelessness.” And this same tired implausible story of utter compassion is told by everyone involved with homelessness no matter how messed up their motives actually are. Our City officials, just ask them, do not use the vast municipal power entrusted to them to fuck up the lives of the unhoused for petty stupid venal purposes.
Even, no doubt, Gil Cedillo will tell you what a goddamned humanitarian he is on these lines. And yet when we look at what he does, what they all do, well, here is Cedillo’s staff arranging for homeless human beings to be displaced from their community just because some sociopathic zillionaire didn’t want his damned construction project to be held up. And the sweep did take place. In fact, on the very next day, February 26, 2019, as reported by Joanna Swan on Twitter, because that’s where the City’s priorities are, what their actions are, no matter what their empty words might suggest. Read a transcription below, and if you haven’t done so already, look into Services Not Sweeps.
Continue reading News About My CPRA Suit Against The City Of Los Angeles Concerning Emails Between CD1 And LAPD — The City Has Abandoned Its Exemption Claims And Provided More Than 200 Pages Of Records — Which Is Good News On The Prevailing Party Front — And At Least One Of The Newly Released Emails Is Exceedingly Important — Not To Mention Appalling — Shows Gil Cedillo’s Deputy District Director Jose Rodriguez Calling In A Homeless Encampment Sweep — In February 2019 — At The Explicit Behest Of Sociopathic Developer Trammell Crow — Because The Mere Presence Of Displaceable Homeless Human Beings Was Interfering With A Project Schedule — Senior Vice President And Failed Screen Actor Alex Valente Has A Lot To Answer For — As Does Gil Freaking Cedillo — And Jose Rodriguez — And Everyone Else Involved In This Abuse Of Municipal Power
Petitioner’s Trial Brief Filed In My Lawsuit Against The Historic Core BID — Get A Copy Here — Read About How Blair Besten Did Not Search The BID’s Mailchimp Account For Responsive Emails Because — Wait For It — She Does Not Consider What Mailchimp Sends To Be Emails — And Other Stories — Trial On The Calendar For September 3, 2019 At 1:30 PM — Stanley Mosk Courthouse Department 85
Perhaps you recall that in August 2018, due to the unhinged intransigent obstructionism of both Ms. Blair Besten, the half-pint Norma Desmond of the Historic Core, and Mr. Jeffrey Charles Briggs, the self-proclaimed Hollywood superlawyer with whom she cahoots, I was forced to file a petition to enforce my rights under the California Public Records Act with a trial scheduled for September 3, 2019 at 1:30 PM in Department 85 of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse.
Well time rolls on, one damn day at a time, we’re all done with meeting and conferring and discovery and all the suchlike pleasant pastimes in which we, the litigious few, engage like some elaborate dance before the main event, and now it’s time to file our trial brief. So that’s just what we did, just yesterday, and you can get a copy here.
And what a brief it is, friends, elaborating as it does on not just the broad overview of the utter unhingedness of Besten’s intransigent obstructionism, but both the nitty and the gritty, every last gritty little grain, of it, spelled out in painstaking detail like a tale told not by but certainly of an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying a lot of something about a whole damn lot of nothing.
Read on for some selections! Although, listen, I’m leaving out all the small-scale details of the BID’s abject failure to respond properly to my requests, where they sent 19 emails here and 17 emails there, none of which were responsive, and then repeated this over and over and over again and then was all like computer problems! Logistical difficulties! Boo freaking boo-hoo-hoo! That right there is a far more than adequate summary.
Also I’m leaving out the details of the requests, which were for interesting emails, which is more than enough detail to follow the argument. If you want to read all that stuff, and the supporting evidence, and it is certainly worth reading, read the whole brief!
Don’t miss the place where Blair Besten insisted under oath that those things that Mailchimp sends out to subscribers aren’t emails, they’re newsletters, and then when asked again if they were emails she was instructed by her supergenius of a lawyer, Mr. Jeffrey Charles Briggs, not to answer as the question called for an expert opinion. Also check out the super-mathematical agreement I made with the BID for production schedules for future requests!
Continue reading Petitioner’s Trial Brief Filed In My Lawsuit Against The Historic Core BID — Get A Copy Here — Read About How Blair Besten Did Not Search The BID’s Mailchimp Account For Responsive Emails Because — Wait For It — She Does Not Consider What Mailchimp Sends To Be Emails — And Other Stories — Trial On The Calendar For September 3, 2019 At 1:30 PM — Stanley Mosk Courthouse Department 85
In January 2019 Sakshi Jain — Founder And Supreme Boss Of Universally-Loathed-By-The-Sane Charter School GANAS Academy — Solicited Her Peeps For What She Was Pleased To Call “Your Meaningful Donation” — So I Hit Her Up For A List Of Donors Along With Amounts Given — And Today I Received A List — With No Last Names — I Hassled The Lawyer — And He Claimed That That Was The List — And That They Claimed No Exemptions — And I Didn’t Believe Him — And Then Jain Emailed Me When She Meant To Email Him — And Admitted That She Had Deleted The Last Names — To Hide Them From Me — So The Lawyer — Lied To By His Client — Handed Over The Complete List — And You Can Read It Here!
Yeah, the headline has the story! Here’s the background! Noted galaxy brain Sakshi Jain is starting a charter school in the City of Carson. It’s called GANAS Academy, and it’s putatively going to co-locate on the campus of the well-beloved neighborhood school Catskill Elementary. But the Catskill folks aren’t taking this quietly. They’re kicking up a damn storm, and rightly so! And I’m investigating right and investigating left and investigating all over the place because who can gaze approvingly upon themselves in the damn mirror in the damn morning if they’re not doing something to thwart these damn privatizers?!
And of course I’m doing my small part by wielding the California Public Records Act like, well, like the California Public Records Act. And in May I got a bunch of emails from the privatizers, and one in particular, this from January 2019, is an important part of the story I’m telling in this post. Therein, you see, amongst other admonitions, did Sakshi Jain admonish her audience thusly: ” If you have not already done so please make your meaningful contribution to the school. The amount of this donation is an amount that is meaningful to you and is not shared with any other board members.”
And a claim like that, that it’s possible for an agency like Jain’s crackpot little charter school that’s subject to the CPRA to keep this kind of crapola secret just because their weirdo sense of what passes for propriety among zillionaires and their willing servants suggests that they ought to do, well, I can’t resist exposing their self-proclaimed but exceedingly putative secrets to the world.
So that very day, the very day I read the email, I popped off this request for records to Jain and her lawyer, the bizarre but weirdly well-dressed little dude known in some circles as H. Wayne Strumpfer, who is of counsel1 to the world’s most privatizing law firm, Young, Minney, and Corr, asking for the damn donation records.
Continue reading In January 2019 Sakshi Jain — Founder And Supreme Boss Of Universally-Loathed-By-The-Sane Charter School GANAS Academy — Solicited Her Peeps For What She Was Pleased To Call “Your Meaningful Donation” — So I Hit Her Up For A List Of Donors Along With Amounts Given — And Today I Received A List — With No Last Names — I Hassled The Lawyer — And He Claimed That That Was The List — And That They Claimed No Exemptions — And I Didn’t Believe Him — And Then Jain Emailed Me When She Meant To Email Him — And Admitted That She Had Deleted The Last Names — To Hide Them From Me — So The Lawyer — Lied To By His Client — Handed Over The Complete List — And You Can Read It Here!
My California Public Records Act Lawsuit Against The Fashion District BID Is Now Fully Briefed In Anticipation Of The Trial — Which Will Take Place On Wednesday June 26, 2019 At 9:30 AM At The Stanley Mosk Courthouse Department 86 — Get Copies Of Everything Here — And Maybe I’ll See You There!
Recall that last August I was forced by the unhinged intransigence of the Fashion District BID to file a petition asking a judge to force them to comply with the California Public Records Act. Things are moving towards the end, and the trial will take place on Wednesday, June 26, 2019 at 9:30 AM at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in Department 86 before Judge Mitchell Beckloff. It looks to be a barn burner, friends, because these BIDdies are really, really angry.
And the way these trials work is that sixty days before trial my lawyer, the incomparable Abenicio Cisneros, files a so-called opening brief, which lays out the case, only outlined in the initial petition, in full detail with all the evidence, argument, and citations to relevant cases. Then thirty days before the opposition files their reply brief, in full detail with all the obstructionist bullshit for which they’re famous. Finally, fifteen days before, we file a reply to the reply and that’s that.
All that briefing is done now, and below find links to everything. There’s a lot of it, and I’m not going to comment on any of it to avoid jinxes, but I will note that the Fashion District’s reply, written by one or both of Bradley & Gmelich galaxy-brains Barry Bradley and Carol Humiston, is an extraordinarily careless piece of work. They consistently misspell the names of cases they’re citing and in one especially egregious case they not only get the name of the case completely wrong, but they get the year wrong too.2
This would be inconsequential if the case weren’t central to everyone’s arguments in this trial and if it weren’t a key component of their argument that the case was decided after I made the requests at issue here. In fact the case was decided before the requests. It’s really unbelievable that seasoned putative professionals made this kind of error, but it seems that they did. Anyway, I hope to see you at the trial, and I’ll be happy to buy you lunch when it’s over if you want to hang out!
Continue reading My California Public Records Act Lawsuit Against The Fashion District BID Is Now Fully Briefed In Anticipation Of The Trial — Which Will Take Place On Wednesday June 26, 2019 At 9:30 AM At The Stanley Mosk Courthouse Department 86 — Get Copies Of Everything Here — And Maybe I’ll See You There!
City Of Los Angeles Sued To Enforce Compliance With The California Public Records Act — In Particular CD11 Has Ignored My Requests For Months On End — Has Blown Through Their Self-Imposed Deadlines — And Are Likely Doing So To Hide Their Complicity In Planter-Placing In Venice — I Am Seeking Emails Between CD11 Staff And Angry Housedwellers — Twitter Blocks And Mutes — And Constituent Communications Done Via The “Romulus” Platform — Read The Masterful Petition Here! — And Confusion To Our Enemies!
Everybody knows about those damn planters in Venice, but we’re just beginning to learn the depth of the City’s complicity with the angry housedwelling planter-placers. And fairly recently I obtained some emails that proved that Mike Bonin’s staff, if not Bonin himself, have been very complicit indeed, which led me to file a complaint with the City Ethics Commission against one of them, Taylor Bazley.3
I obtained those emails by accident, in response to a request to the LAPD that I made for a fairly different reason, but I have actually been trying to get planter-related stuff from CD11 at least since December 2018 and have been completely, utterly, thoroughly, and even literally ignored by Mike Bonin’s staff since then. They have not produced a single record in response to my requests.
And, as you surely know by now, the legislature has left the people of California only one remedy to enforce their rights under this law, and that is to file a petition asking a judge to order the neglectful ones to get it together and comply. So that, this very day, is what I did with our friends at CD11. You can get a copy here, powerfully written by the incomparable Anna von Herrman, and there’s a transcription below.
Basically there are three classes of requests. First I asked for emails between CD11 staff and various suspects in the planter-placing and other anti-homeless psychopathy with some names culled from especially angry NextDoor comments. These included both Mark Ryavec and George Francisco.
Next, as part of a series I was working on at the time, I asked for a list of all official CD11 Twitter accounts and also lists of users blocked or muted by those accounts. And finally, I asked for data from CD11’s use of the so-called Romulus Constituent Services software, which someone had told me Bonin used to talk to people outside of more predictable channels like email.
This last request Krista Kline, Mike Bonin’s deputy chief of staff in charge of something shady, refused to fulfill, claiming that it was “overly voluminous,” and the others she initially promised to produce records in response to but then did not.4 All of this material is of great, practically incalculable, public interest with respect to not only the planters but also for understanding how the City decides which encampments to sweep, and many other things besides. So stay tuned for updates on events, and read some lengthy selections from the petition below.
Continue reading City Of Los Angeles Sued To Enforce Compliance With The California Public Records Act — In Particular CD11 Has Ignored My Requests For Months On End — Has Blown Through Their Self-Imposed Deadlines — And Are Likely Doing So To Hide Their Complicity In Planter-Placing In Venice — I Am Seeking Emails Between CD11 Staff And Angry Housedwellers — Twitter Blocks And Mutes — And Constituent Communications Done Via The “Romulus” Platform — Read The Masterful Petition Here! — And Confusion To Our Enemies!
South Central Hollywood Racketeer Club Larchmont Village BID Loses Public Records Act Lawsuit!! — Ordered By Judge Mary Strobel To Stop Fooling Around And Do An Adequate Search For The Damn Records!! — Their Kooky Legal Strategy Dismissed Out Of Hand!! — Apparently Their Kooky Lawyer Thomas Cairns Misrepresented Facts To The Court — Motion For Fees Likely To Follow — A New Request For Records Already Filed!
Long story short. The weirdos over at the Larchmont Village BID completely ignored my 2017 requests for records, so in March 2018 I had to file a petition against them. They failed to file an answer to the petition and then showed up at the trial setting conference whining about how mean I was and asking for extra time to file an answer. Well, they never filed anything, and in March 2019 my lawyer, the incomparable Abenicio Cisneros, filed a smashing opening brief.
And then on May 16 of this year we all showed up for the trial. And even Thomas Cairns showed up, twitching like a tweaker, half-empty pack of Marlboro Reds in his briefcase, prescription aviator shades perched on his surreally toupeed brow. And the judge, Mary Strobel, called the case. And Cairns began babbling some crazed stream of consciousness in which he seemed to be representing that he didn’t actually appear before the court in 20185 and therefore everything should be tossed on a technicality.
The judge seemed skeptical, like really, really, really skeptical, of Cairns’s claim. But she decided to put off the hearing for a couple weeks while she ordered up a transcript to check Cairns’s assertions. The new hearing was held last Tuesday, June 4, 2019. And it turned out that in 2018 Cairns didn’t say anything like what he claimed he said. It was all a big fat lie.
And when the judge explained this to him he had the nerve to ask for another 30 days to file a response to my brief! Strobel said no way, friend, and ruled against the BID on all of my causes of action. You can read her ruling here and there is a transcription below.
Also, don’t forget that if a requester, that’s me, prevails, as I did, in a CPRA action then the respondent, that’s the BID, has to pay my lawyer’s fees and also all the costs involved in filing the suit. That doesn’t happen automatically, though. There’s a whole new set of proceedings, which will start with filing a motion asking for the money, about which I will let you know when it happens.
And finally, finally, this victory means that I am free to start requesting records from these Larchmontane criminals once again. Sent some askyness off to these gangsters the instant I learned of the ruling! And read it here! Looking forward to receiving, reading, publishing, analyzing, and, of course, mocking the holy hell out of these goodies!
Continue reading South Central Hollywood Racketeer Club Larchmont Village BID Loses Public Records Act Lawsuit!! — Ordered By Judge Mary Strobel To Stop Fooling Around And Do An Adequate Search For The Damn Records!! — Their Kooky Legal Strategy Dismissed Out Of Hand!! — Apparently Their Kooky Lawyer Thomas Cairns Misrepresented Facts To The Court — Motion For Fees Likely To Follow — A New Request For Records Already Filed!
Opening Brief Filed In Chinatown BID Public Records Act Lawsuit — A Powerful Statement Of The Intense Public Interest In Understanding This Shadowy Criminal Conspiracy — And What It Is Doing With The Public Money That Funds It — Neither George Yu Nor Anyone From The BID Has Responded To Anything — Or Participated In Any Way At All In The Petition Against Them — Trial Is Set For July 24 2019 At 9:30 AM — Stanley Mosk Courthouse Department 86
Last August Katherine McNenny and I filed a suit against the Chinatown Business Improvement District because not only did they refuse to provide us with the public records we’d asked for repeatedly but they refused to respond at all. Their bossboy, George Yu, was, you may recall, deeply implicated in the 2017 zillionaire conspiracy against the Skid Row Neighborhood Council formation effort, so they clearly had and, we hope, still have, a lot of really essential information.
But George Yu and his criminal cronies at the BID, I guess true to the pattern they’d established with respect to the requests themselves, refused to respond in any way to the lawsuit. They didn’t reply to the petition, they ignored the discovery, they didn’t show up for the hearing on the motion to expedite hearing of the motion to compel them to answer the damn discovery,6 and so on. But the case rolls on, and on Friday, May 24, our lawyers filed an absolutely stunning opening brief.7
You can read transcribed selections below and here’s a super-short summary. The Chinatown BID is a major player in municipal politics. This includes George’s Yu’s participation in the conspiracy against the Skid Row Neighborhood Council. Through our CPRA requests we sought to understand the BID’s role in this and their relationship with the City in general.
The BID failed to respond at all to these requests and that violates the California Public Records Act. Therefore the court should require the BID to produce the records. We’re also asking the court to declare that the BID’s actions violated the CPRA8 and to issue an injunction against the BID violating the law in this manner in the future. Finally, we’re asking the court to order the BID to pay our attorneys for their work on our case.
Continue reading Opening Brief Filed In Chinatown BID Public Records Act Lawsuit — A Powerful Statement Of The Intense Public Interest In Understanding This Shadowy Criminal Conspiracy — And What It Is Doing With The Public Money That Funds It — Neither George Yu Nor Anyone From The BID Has Responded To Anything — Or Participated In Any Way At All In The Petition Against Them — Trial Is Set For July 24 2019 At 9:30 AM — Stanley Mosk Courthouse Department 86
A Coalition Of Poverty-Focused Community-Driven Advocacy And Legal Aid Organizations Filed An Amicus Brief With The California Supreme Court Asking That They Review The Abominable Court Of Appeals Opinion In National Lawyers Guild V. City Of Hayward — Which Held That Agencies Can Charge For Time Spent Redacting Electronic Records — Now Being Used By The LAPD To Functionally Deny Everyone Access To Emails — This Was In November 2018 But I Just Recently Got A Copy — The Supremes Did Agree To Hear It — And I Also Have A Copy Of The Stunning Opening Brief
Don’t know if you’re aware, but in September 2018 the California Court of Appeal held that local agencies could charge CPRA requesters for staff time for redacting electronic records. In particular, the City of Hayward charged the National Lawyers Guild more than $3,000 to redact some parts of bodycam videos. It’s well-established for paper records that agencies must allow inspection at no cost and if copies are requested, can charge only the direct cost of copying.
The Court of Appeals based its opinion on the CPRA’s much-abused §6253.9(b)(2) which states that an agency can charge a requester for the bare privilege of inspecting a record under a small set of very specific circumstances:
… the requester shall bear the cost of producing a copy of the record, including the cost to construct a record, and the cost of programming and computer services necessary to produce a copy of the record when … [t]he request would require data compilation, extraction, or programming to produce the record.
The court’s reasoning was that redaction of a video constitutes extraction required to produce the record. Sane people can see, however, that the video already exists. Nothing is required to produce it. This section is talking about e.g. running queries against databases, where the requester only wants certain information and the results of the query constitute a new record that “would require data compilation, extraction, or programming to produce.”
And as you can imagine, after this opinion was published, obstructionist anti-CPRA lawyers all over the state started drooling on their pillows in glee. For instance, Carol Humiston, the soon-to-be-disbarred Rasputinian ear-whisperer to transparency-averse business improvement districts all over Los Angeles, advised her clients on the basis of this decision to assert that if I wanted to see any more of their damn emails I would have to pay for them to buy Adobe Pro so that they could redact them.
She backed off on this outlandish claim after I pointed out repeatedly that emails weren’t found in the wild as PDFs so that there was no case to be made for purchasing an expensive PDF editor to do a job that the built-in text editors that come with every computer operating system could do better. However, the LAPD also glommed onto this case, and the City Attorney’s office began theorizing madly, and now if you submit a request to LAPD for emails through NextRequest you’re met with an aggressive notice warning you that you’re going to pay and pay and pay unless you withdraw your request right now, and the notice explicitly cites the case.
So yeah, this opinion sucks and sucks big time, and it doesn’t just suck in theory, it’s actively sucking in practice even now as I write these very words. But at least it was appealed to the California Supreme Court. And at least the Supreme Court agreed to hear it. And papers have been filed, but it turns out to be really hard to get pleadings out of the Supreme Court.
But recently I was lucky enough to obtain a couple of interesting items. Here’s an amicus letter from a coalition of public interest law firms and activist organizations explaining the harm that the decision is doing. And here’s the opening brief, which explains in well-reasoned and exceedinly convincing terms why the Court should reverse this extraordinarily bad appellate decision. Both are fabulously worth reading, and there’s a transcription of the amicus letter after the break.
Continue reading A Coalition Of Poverty-Focused Community-Driven Advocacy And Legal Aid Organizations Filed An Amicus Brief With The California Supreme Court Asking That They Review The Abominable Court Of Appeals Opinion In National Lawyers Guild V. City Of Hayward — Which Held That Agencies Can Charge For Time Spent Redacting Electronic Records — Now Being Used By The LAPD To Functionally Deny Everyone Access To Emails — This Was In November 2018 But I Just Recently Got A Copy — The Supremes Did Agree To Hear It — And I Also Have A Copy Of The Stunning Opening Brief
Since 2016 Eleven CPRA Lawsuits Against The City Of Los Angeles Have Been Disposed Of — The City Lost Two At Trial And Paid Up — And Settled Eight Before Trial And Paid Up — And The Only One They Didn’t Lose Was The One Wrongly Filed In Federal Court By A Pro Se Litigant — For A Total Of $662,722 — And Given That They’re About To Pay More Than $324,000 To The ACLU To Settle Another Loser — This Is More Than A Million Dollars In Less Than Four Years That They Wasted Because They Can Not Or They Will Not Comply With The Law — For That Kind Of Money They Could Hire A Damn CPRA Coordinator — And Some Staff — And Stop The Bleeding
If you make requests of the City of Los Angeles under the California Public Records Act you will have learned by now that they fail to comply in almost every possible way. They delay access to records, they wrongfully withhold records as exempt, they fail to respond to requests at all, they say that there are no responsive records when in fact there are, they manipulate requesters into asking for far less than they have a right to by wrongly citing authorities, they insist on printing electronic records onto paper and then charge for copies, and so on and on and on. It’s a real nightmare.
Some of the City’s shenanigans are due to the fact that the state legislature, in its wisdom, has made judicial action the only means of enforcing the CPRA. The City, probably with reason, assumes that most requesters don’t have the resources or the tenacity to follow through with a lawsuit, so the expected consequences for their abject noncompliance are pretty minimal. And that may be an accurate assessment, it’s hard to tell because I don’t have access to all the data.
But not having access to all doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get access to some, so I have been investigating CPRA suits against the City of Los Angeles. I first started thinking about this matter in 2015 but was at that time told by Deputy City Attorney Mike Dundas9 that the City had no way of listing CPRA suits against it. But after all that nonsense happened in San Diego recently, what with their City Attorney,10 Mara Elliot, tricking Senator Ben Hueso into introducing his appalling and since-withdrawn CPRA-gutting SB 615 and then some people got a spreadsheet showing how much the City of San Diego had spent on CPRA suits since 2010.
So I thought I’d ask Mike Dundas again and what do you know!? He came through and also informed me that the City Attorney11 had assigned a cause code to CPRA suits in 2016 so that it was now possible to track them individually.12 And then, kablooie! He produced this list of ten closed cases with payouts since 2016!13 And then later he told me that there was this one other closed case that didn’t involve a payout since the City was dismissed from it on a motion.14 And according to him he will be producing15 a list of the currently open cases.16
And just the bare numbers here are really interesting, but not a good look for the City of Los Angeles. Since 2016 eleven CPRA cases against the City have been disposed of. The City went to trial on two of these and lost, paying a total of $558,690.57 to petitioners’ lawyers. The City unfavorably settled eight of them before trial, paying a total of $104,032 to petitioners’ lawyers. And the City got itself dismissed from one before trial, but only because the petitioner mistakenly filed the case in federal court.
I obtained copies of all ten of the properly filed petitions, and you can find them here on the Archive and there are also links to the individual files below. From a practical point of view, those eight cases that the City settled without going to trial are the most interesting of all. First of all, they were all avoidable. None of them hinged on any subtle interpretations of the statute. If the City had just followed the explicit requirements of the law none of them would have been brought in the first place.
I describe each of them briefly below, by the way. The City has really come to rely on not being sued, and I don’t think we have any hope at all of improving their compliance without a lot more petitions being filed. It’s my hope that these statistics along with access to these cases will encourage more lawyers to get involved in suing the City over CPRA violations. It really looks like there’s some money to be made.
But, much, much more importantly, it looks like it might be not only practically possible, not only morally desirable, but also economically feasible to get the damn City of Los Angeles to just comply with the damn CPRA in some kind of predictable way. The money they spend settling these cases could easily fund a Citywide CPRA coordinator and another staff member just to keep all the City departments on track so that we get access to our records and the City avoids an endless parade of these entirely avoidable suits.
Continue reading Since 2016 Eleven CPRA Lawsuits Against The City Of Los Angeles Have Been Disposed Of — The City Lost Two At Trial And Paid Up — And Settled Eight Before Trial And Paid Up — And The Only One They Didn’t Lose Was The One Wrongly Filed In Federal Court By A Pro Se Litigant — For A Total Of $662,722 — And Given That They’re About To Pay More Than $324,000 To The ACLU To Settle Another Loser — This Is More Than A Million Dollars In Less Than Four Years That They Wasted Because They Can Not Or They Will Not Comply With The Law — For That Kind Of Money They Could Hire A Damn CPRA Coordinator — And Some Staff — And Stop The Bleeding