The Case of the Missing Staff Reports
Flashlight? Check. Sensible shoes? Check. Plethora of healthy trail mix that I have loaded up with chocolate and Cheetos? Check.
It was time to find any and all staff reports or videos for the City of Vallejo prior to 2019. It wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew that if I just dressed like Wally from Leave it to Beaver and found a faithful sidekick I could channel the Hardy Boys and get this shit done.
For some reason, it appeared that all staff reports and videos for city council had been taken down from the City website prior to Sept 2020. I found this disconcerting because reporters have to go back and look at old stuff all the time.
“Dude, that violates the Brown Act,” I was told. “That’s hella illegal to not have that stuff posted.”
But was it? I emailed two prominent attorneys who informed me that it did not, in fact, violate the Brown Act as long as the documents could be found by making a public records request. To quote the hard-working team that handles PRAs in Vallejo (and I am not being sarcastic here, they are great), that seemed “unduly burdensome.” First, one has to know what one is looking for, which means 99 percent of the time I would be SOL. And I’m a seasoned Vallejo news geek. Imagine the poor woman who hasn’t even been to a city council meeting but is curious about zoning laws in 2018.
Once I had deduced that nothing illegal was going on, I moved straight to curiosity. The usual suspect’s name kept coming up from people I know at the City– Greg Nyhoff.
“He ordered Naveed to take them down after the Monterrosa shooting,” one source said.
I decided to make a public record request about it. In my PRA I asked for emails or other messages between Vallejo’s Chief Innovation Officer Naveed Ashraf and former City Manager Greg Nyhoff about removing older city council staff reports, agendas, and videos. The City then responded that my request was too broad and I need to narrow it down and perhaps give them some search terms. I emailed them back with the following: “Terms might consist of “remove from website,” “city council staff reports and recordings,” “take down,” “Naveed remove,” “Naveed take down,” “city council staff reports recordings online.”
This was not specific enough:
“The City has determined that your request still includes a voluminous amount of responsive individual records, all of which would have to be reviewed to ensure that they are indeed within the scope of the request and then for the presence of exempt material prior to disclosure. As such, the request is not sufficiently focused, is unduly burdensome and must be narrowed before the City can respond.”
After all this, I had a ‘no shit Sherlock’ moment and emailed the City and simply asked why the records were taken down, and that I could not locate them. I got a quick response telling me that a link exists on the agendas page. And there it was, in bright red. You can access it here.
But wait, there’s more. The Archive looks like something from Dos or Pong Sports. It is simply a readout of dates and links with zero context. Zero search capability.
Not gonna lie, this makes me very frustrated. The City needs to be more transparent than this. If it’s a matter of needing room on some server or whatever (you can see why I’m not Chief Innovation Officer) then figure out where it CAN be placed, along with search capabilities etc. I’d guess that a chunk of traffic to the agendas pages is people searching for older things. Case closed.
