Gilroy
– All e-mails sent to and from city councilmen will reside on
City Hall computers for at least 60 days – a change that open
government advocates believe will help ensure city business is
conducted in public view.
Gilroy – All e-mails sent to and from city councilmen will reside on City Hall computers for at least 60 days – a change that open government advocates believe will help ensure city business is conducted in public view.
Until today, all electronic communications from lobbyists, voters and others seeking to influence Gilroy’s top governing body were routed to private e-mail accounts. Likewise, all messages sent by the seven councilmen emanated from those private addresses. None of the back-and-forth correspondence was stored on servers at City Hall, as is the case for Gilroy’s 270-plus employees.
The practice – which city officials said is common among California cities – means that communications normally subject to public scrutiny fall outside the reach of so-called Sunshine laws.
But greater transparency was not the sole or even primary motivation behind a Monday night council vote to adopt a new system.
“I see it as a better way of managing e-mails,” Councilman Craig Gartman said. “It’s more of a practicality thing, unless there were people who are hiding things or we’re investigating people who are trying to hide e-mails. We got a request for some records and we all had an opportunity to see how cumbersome it is to pull all those messages up.”
Gartman and other council members spent several days in recent weeks combing through their e-mail accounts for messages related to secret retirement deals struck by Gilroy’s top two police officials. The Dispatch requested the e-mails to determine, among other things, when council first learned that Police Chief Gregg Giusiana and Asst. Chief Lanny Brown retired and “returned” to work as part-time employees. The change in employment status is legal and even common among California employees, but has inspired controversy because of the city manager’s failure to disclose the arrangement to council and rank-and-file police.
On March 19, city officials and councilmen released more than 200 pages of e-mails related to the retirement deals. At least half of the messages are duplicates since multiple council members were copied on the same e-mails. The messages indicate that Giusiana and Brown began discussing their retirements with City Hall last fall, and that City Administrator Jay Baksa first informed council of the arrangements in early February, in anticipation of a Dispatch story on the subject.
The stack of e-mails contain a number of discrepancies in which certain council members did not disclose messages that they should have received, as indicated by the list of recipients in messages disclosed by other officials. For instance, Councilman Russ Valiquette did not provide a message disclosed by Baksa, in which the councilman thanks the city manager for “trying to put an end” to the retirement scandal by admitting, in an open letter to the public, that he should have been more forthcoming. Valiquette said he passed over the communication because it did not directly relate to the retirement deals.
Under the new system that goes into effect today, the process of judging which e-mails fit a public records request would be taken out of the hands of the public officials who drafted or received the communications. Keyword searches will allow the city’s information technology department to zero in on relevant messages.
“As far as I can see, it’s all for the good,” said Terry Francke, general counsel for Californians Aware, a nonprofit government watchdog. “Shunting communications on official matters automatically into private correspondence is no more justified it seems to me when the (recipient) is a council member than when he or she is on the staff. In principle, if council were allowed to do this, there would be nothing preventing anyone in government from doing it.”
The city has yet to decide how long it will store council e-mails. Under the city’s current system, any messages deleted by staff – and now council – are permanently erased after 60 days. Cities across California take differing approaches to the matter.
State records retention laws require public documents to be held for at least two years before they are destroyed. The law makes no distinction between paper and electronic records, Francke said.
Cities across California have differing standards councilmen learned Monday. Some retain e-mails for two months, others for as long as two-years, according to David Chulick, director of the city’s information technology department.
Mayor Al Pinheiro called for additional research into standards or “best practices” recommended by the California League of Cities. In the meantime, he had mixed feelings about the new system, which requires council members to log into their accounts remotely.
“Now I don’t have to be searching my computer for the e-mails you guys want,” he said. “They have the experts that can do the keyword searching and find everything. But it makes it harder for access. Instead of having everything (on my computer), I’ll have to go a couple times a day to the site and log in.”
