Councilmen prepare to discuss final report, but where are the
first two drafts?
Chris Bone – Staff Writer
cb***@************ch.com
GILROY
City officials may have placated open government advocates, but they now face three more requests for transparency.
In an unusual move, the city council voted unanimously Oct. 15 to release the last two drafts of Matrix Consulting Group’s report concerning the future of the 9-1-1 call center and the efficiency of the police department’s deployment of officers.
But the first two drafts are nowhere to be found, and the e-mail correspondences among city officials and the company, as well as the police officers’ completed surveys, remain unavailable.
Because of this The Dispatch has filed three separate requests for the first two drafts, the surveys and all e-mails under the state’s Public Records Act. The city has until Nov. 26 to release the materials or deny the requests. This will likely follow the council’s Nov. 16 safety policy summit, during which the council will review the final report and make recommendations.
Last month the city rejected the newspaper’s initial request for all draft reports. Assistant City Attorney Jolie Houston cited a government code that exempts from disclosure preliminary drafts “that are not retained by the public agency in the ordinary course of business.” She also cited the city’s deliberative process privilege.
But as counsel for the non-profit, open-government group Californians Aware, Terry Francke disagreed. He said releasing all the materials would not hinder or “chill” the final draft’s production (or any future drafts) because governments can withhold only confidential information, like a police officer’s name or rank, but nothing factual that officer might have said in a draft report, like his/her individual survey results.
Despite Houston’s decision, the council approved the release of the last two reports. Only top-level police officials and City Administrator Jay Baksa have seen Matrix’s two preliminary reports to date while councilmen have only received as much as the public: the final report and its third draft.
City officials have said releasing uncorrected draft reports could confuse and alarm residents, whereas the final product is clean and error-free. On top of this, the city cannot release nonexistent reports: Assistant City Administrator Anna Jatczak and others have claimed that the original first and second drafts are gone because Matrix wrote over them for the third and final drafts.
One Matrix employee hinted at the same and also said the company would let the city handle the public records requests.
“There’s not a significant amount of difference between what you (the public and councilmen) have (in the final report) and what we started with,” said Byron Pipkin, a senior manager at Matrix who worked on the four reports. Pipkin said the changes made to the drafts were minor corrections usually resulting from “the way I looked at something.”
As per the allegedly lost first and second draft reports, Pipkin would not go into specifics since his boss was out of town, but he said he usually does not keep them for practical reasons.
“Once I’m satisfied that the changes are accurate and correct, I typically dump any earlier drafts because they take up space on my computer.”
But transparency proponents such as Francke and Councilman-elect Perry Woodward say lost information like this and the off-limits consultation (e-mail and otherwise) among Baksa, the police department and Matrix jeopardize the report’s initial candor and allow for over-zealous redaction.
