Last Blog On Earth

On April 16, Voiceofsandiego.org’s Andrew Donohue broke a story about former San Diego Assistant Chief Operating Officer Rick Reynolds suing the city for wrongful termination. Central to the suit was an e-mail sent by Fred Sainz, Mayor Jerry Sanders’ communications director, to Bob Kittle, the San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial page editor. Donohue and other reporters filed requests to get the e-mail under California’s Public Records Act. Requesting government e-mail is routine, and generally the law requires those requests to be acceded to. But Donohue’s request was denied, so he started writing regular posts about his attempts to get the document. Yesterday, Sainz released the e-mail exclusively to the Union-Tribune, whose story on it appears in today’s paper.

Musing on this development in a post written today, Donohue wonders whether it’s appropriate for Sainz to make decisions on where and how to release e-mail that he wrote, especially an e-mail central to a lawsuit involving the city.

As it happens, I ran into precisely this problem last fall. I had filed a Public Records Act request for all of Fred Sainz’s e-mails sent to or received from a specified group of local reporters. The law requires response within 10 days, but a month later I finally got an e-mail response from press assistant Christina Dileva. She said she’d conferred with Sainz, and that he had decided my request was “overly broad.” The law does allow recipients of these requests to ask for clarification, but I had named specific correspondents and specific dates. There was nothing vague about it. So I argued with them, but Sainz remained stubborn. CityBeat’s editor, David Rolland, confronted Sainz about the request at an event they both attended. Sainz told him the Public Records Act is “not a fishing expedition for reporters” (meaning, an attempt to find a story with no prior knowledge that there might be one), words he later repeated to me in an e-mail. I carefully read the law, and I consulted with an attorney. There’s nothing in the act limiting who can ask for information or for what reason, so long as there is a public interest involved.

In the same e-mail where he accused me of prospecting, he said he would only comply with the request if I narrowed the focus in some way. Ultimately, CityBeat does not have the resources to sue the city under this law, and we decided to narrow the request, so we could get at least some information.

But the whole affair raised similar questions for me as it has for Donohue. Why is the mayor’s communications director, an extremely political appointee, making any kind of decision about public records requests? Shouldn’t he at least defer when the request relates to him? For that matter, shouldn’t the City Attorney be interpreting the law for these requests?

I only got an answer to the third of those questions. Sainz told me in a phone discussion that the mayor’s office never gets advice from the City Attorney on public records requests any more. Apparently the tension between City Attorney Mike Aguirre and the mayor’s office had gotten so bad that Sanders’ people avoid using the City Attorney’s office whenever possible. Readers of the U-T story and Donohue’s posts will note it was not a lawyer for the City Attorney who made the decision on the Sainz-Kittle email, but Julie Dubick, who is an attorney, but whose title is Director of Policy.