Corruption. Backstabbing. Political assassination.

At a meeting last month, Anthony Becker, Santa Clara’s former vice mayor, lobbed these accusations during the public comments section of a Santa Clara City Council meeting. During his comments, Becker called for city employees to investigate a leak of FIFA documents to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Following the meeting, Becker filed a request under the city’s 030, requesting city employees put the item on a future agenda for discussion. But barriers at city hall block public access to information and rob them of the ability to have their concerns heard publicly.

Prior to 2023, the city’s 030 policy allowed anyone to file a request and have an item agendized.

However, city employees wanted a more “streamlined” process. That means if someone, including council members, wants something put on the agenda, they have to work with city employees — behind closed doors.

An Attack on Democracy

Council Member Kevin Park, who sits on the city’s governance and ethics committee, said that “streamlining” has “removed democracy” from public engagement. He has repeatedly raised issues with the process. Park said city employees — or even the council — shouldn’t need to approve an agenda item.

That’s because public members may want to illuminate something the council or city employees are doing wrong. Needing approval from council or city employees all but ensures a public member’s grievance won’t come to light, he said.

“How much support do you think they would get from the council? How much support from staff? I don’t know,” he said. “This is not the way it should be. If somebody wants to agendize an item, it should be agendized.”

The issue with 030s is just one barrier toward public transparency. The Weekly has reported on these issues before, and the culture of obfuscation has stood, if not worsened.

Another barrier is that the email labeled “Mayor and Council” also goes to city employees, not the council. City employees are then supposed to forward emails to the appropriate council members. They are supposed to. 

Park said emails, typically inviting council members to speak at public events, often fail to reach him. He said he suspects city employees are vanguarding communications to prevent certain council members from attending. 

Every time he has raised the issue, Park said city employees accuse him of casting aspersions on them or strongly discourage him from insisting an item appear on the agenda. The attitude is particularly galling, he said, because such a process could easily be automated.

“There should never be a disconnect in communication … Why do we leave it in their hands in the first place?” Park said. “If you sharpen the axe before you start cutting, the cutting goes much faster … Every time staff makes an improvement to something, things actually get worse.”

He called the procedures an “attack on democracy.”

Into the Void

The public is also supposed to be able to get information through records requests. But doing so is often like pulling teeth. Last summer, The Weekly submitted a records request seeking correspondence about the Nuevo Dog Park closing.

The city took more than four months to produce records relating to the closing. Contained in those records were emails from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. A records request to Santa Clara County revealed emails not contained in the city’s initial response. Three days after The Weekly published a story on the situation, the city posted the missing emails on its public portal.

Another request submitted by a public member sought clarity on a claim Mayor Lisa Gillmor made during a council meeting in November last year. During a discussion on the city’s stadium neighborhood relations committee, Gillmor said she gets a “ton” of complaints from the neighborhoods around the stadium, adding that residents contact her “directly or on social media.”

The request called for the city to produce those correspondences, both from Gillmor and Kathy Watanabe, the former council member for the district near the stadium. The city took more than two-and-a-half months to publish a response and continued to publish documents through February. Contained in those documents were 22 emails over an eight-year span, most of which never went to Gillmor. 

The documents contained no social media messages.

And it isn’t just these two requests. Almost every time The Weekly submits a records request, the city kicks the can down the road, extending the simplest request for as long as possible, using a slew of exemptions and excuses. In the rare event the city produces documents, they are meager. Further, Gillmor and Watanabe are both notorious for failing to produce material for records requests.

Suspecting these situations violated the California Public Records Act, The Weekly emailed City Attorney Glen Googins. In those emails, The Weekly sought a legal explanation as to why such behavior was being allowed. Googins never replied. 

A Pattern of Denial

A 2019 California Civil Grand Jury report, titled “The City of Santa Clara: Public Records Access – The Paper Chase,” found the city’s “recordkeeping to be disorganized” and getting supposedly publicly available information to be a “time-consuming and difficult chore.”

When a civil grand jury accused several of her council colleagues of colluding with the San Francisco 49ers in 2022, Gillmor was keen to put the grand jury on a pedestal. Despite her frequent defense of that grand jury, in a 176-page response to the 19-page grand jury report from 2019, Gillmor dug in her heels. She noted that the council questioned why the grand jury singled out Santa Clara and took issue with the “lack of benchmarking.”

The report called for the city to provide employees additional training, create a written policy and put in place a records management system. 

In response to the recommendation that the city should “only invoke the 14-day extension where permissible,” the city claimed such a policy was already in place. It claimed a written policy was underway, that setting up a management system “required further analysis” and that it will not train other city employees on records requests because “it is not warranted or is not reasonable.”

The problem is deeper than just city hall. During his vie for Santa Clara police chief, Cory Morgan vowed to increase transparency. Toward that end, he said he would bring back the department’s police blotter. More than a year into his tenure, he has yet to deliver on that promise.         

Not Alone

Jim McManis, a partner of McManis Faulkner, successfully sued San Jose for failing to disclose public records. He said these types of shenanigans “don’t surprise” him and are “very typical” of most cities and counties across California.

“It flies in the face of the California constitution. It flies in the face of many statutes. Most cities couldn’t care less,” he said.

Cities often respond to reasonable records requests with “meaningless memos” and throw every excuse in the book — no matter how irrelevant — at the wall to see what sticks, he said.

David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, said he works hard not to assume bad intent. Perhaps city employees are overworked or under-trained, he said. But that itself is a red flag, he added.

Further, sometimes requests are too broad or too narrow to produce the desired information, he said. The law requires agencies to perform a reasonably adequate search, provided it doesn’t impose an “undue burden” on the agency.

“They don’t have to spend weeks scrambling to track down records,” Loy said. “They can’t bury their heads in the sand either.”

However, “undue burden” is often “way more than agencies think,” Loy said. Unfortunately, typically, the only remedy to the recalcitrance is to sue. 

Convincing agencies to spend money for transparency is a tough sell, Loy said. Because cities and counties are “playing with house money,” they often just bake such lawsuits into the cost of doing business, he added.

Both McManis and Loy said the problem isn’t unique to Santa Clara. Loy called it “endemic” across the state.

“California fancies itself as very progressive, but it lags behind other states in the area of transparency,” Loy said. “Different agencies have different cultures around transparency. With some agencies, it is like squeezing blood from a stone.”

So, while city employees and council members proclaim their devotion to transparency, they continue to play hide-the-ball with the public. Given the trend, the likelihood the city will get its act together any time soon isn’t promising.

Contact David Alexander at d.todd.alexander@gmail.com