California Public Records Act Expert Terry Franke Shares Insights

The Sacramento Bee has run a very informative interview with Terry Franke -- co-founder and general counsel of Californians Aware.  Among his insights: California's court created deliberative process exemption has resulted in more documents being marked "draft" in order to create a presumption that supports withholding.  So, rather than simply arguing that releasing a record would interfere with an elected or other government official's ability to reach a decision without undue negative influence (i.e., the "deliberative process"), Franke notes that governments now go out of their way to label documents as drafts so as to protect them from release. Read the full interview here.

Bay Citizen Demonstrates Method for Researching Hospital District Boards

Wonderful piece in The Bay Citizen on researching local hospital district boards.  The piece is by Jennifer Gollan and Katharine Mieszkowski.  Read it carefully for good tips on the research methods used to tackle local oversight and governance board research.  Here's our exegesis:

• Conflict of Interest statements matter -- Members of many local boards and commissions are required to file these forms.  Often overlooked, they can help tie in family members or businesses to contracts approved by the local board of commission.  An example from The Bay Citizen piece -- local bank CEO who sits on a hospital district board and reported owning stock in his bank's parent company worth upwards of $1 million while the local bank collected $1.2 million in fees from the hospital district.  How did they find out -- the local bank CEO reported his stock ownership on his conflict of interest form.

• Relationships matter -- As illustrated in the example above, a key to this type of research method is knowing how the members of the board or commission you are studying relate to the vendors receiving contracts.  Keep in mind that human nature applies -- people more readily do business with people they already know.

• Contracts and minutes matter -- Boards and commissions keep a written record of their meetings which will, at a minimum, record how members voted and what they voted on.  Some will even produce a video or audio record.  Expert tip:  Capture the minutes (either by download or by scanning the paper copies)  and run them through an optical character recognition software (like Adobe) and they become word searchable.

• Know the regulators -- Boards and commissions are remote islands of government but not completely islands unto themselves.  In its piece, The Bay Citizen cited a California State Auditor report and noted that the hospital district boards it studied were also monitored (albeit loosely) by county-based entities known as Local Agency Formation Commissions.  This is a California-only regulatory set-up but the point is the same -- check the set-up where you are doing the research because there should be some outside review of the local board apparatus.

California Judges Required to Post Conflict of Interest Statements Online

California's Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) ruled this week that state judges are not exempt from the online filing of conflict of interest statements. Judges and other statewide officeholders have been required for decades to file California Form 700 but the California Judges Association has been fighting for two years to get its members exempted from a regulation requiring that the forms be filed online. For a good (and brief) summary of the judicial Form 700 issue read the Sacramento Bee.

For a complete list of which officials file with the FPPC, access this page at the Commission.