Record Missing From Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown's Adminstration - Former Aide Gil Duran Erased Negative Information On Jerry

Well, this should prove just how much Jerry and Gil Duran had to hide (its not the first time they've been accused of a cover-up) -- and how damaging his term was to Oakland. It should be against the law for anyone to do this, but hey, Jerry's AG now, he's really protected.

And what about all the talk of wanting "open meetings"? Right!

Who voted him in to that office?


Mayoral files for Jerry Brown are missing
By Thomas Peele and Heather MacDonald

MEDIANEWS STAFF - CCTIMES

Some public records of new state Attorney General Jerry Brown's eight years as Oakland mayor are missing and others were apparently improperly destroyed, raising questions about whether the state's top law-enforcement official has violated California's public records law.

Two former Brown aides said they removed records from the office late last year. One of them, Gil Duran, said he consulted Michelle Abney, the public records coordinator in the city attorney's office, before doing so.

But Abney's boss, Mark Morodomi, the assistant city attorney in charge of records access, said no permission was granted and no such conversation ever took place.

State law makes it a crime to remove, tamper with or destroy government records.

Abney "does not recall a conversation with Duran regarding what to do with documents in the transition of the mayor's office," Morodomi said Friday.

Morodomi said neither he nor anyone else in his office gave Brown's staff approval to throw away or remove public records. State law requires the approval of the city attorney or council before disposing of records less than two years old and prohibits the destruction of certain others.

Because of MediaNews questions about the status of Brown's records, City Attorney John Russo will form a task force to review all of the city's records retention policies, Morodomi said Friday.

It is unclear exactly which of Brown's records may be missing or were destroyed.

"We got rid of all the stuff that we thought was electronically backed up," said the other former aide, David Grenell. "A lot of things were thrown away, Raiders documents, things like that."

Duran, Brown's former press aide, said he spoke with Abney and received her permission to purge files.

"Everything was handled properly and according to the law," Duran said.

Brown was on vacation out of the country last week and could not be reached for comment. Nathan Barankin, his state Department of Justice spokesman, said he spoke with Brown and was assured that no records were improperly destroyed.

Barankin said Brown is a notoriously poor record-keeper and said that he didn't generate many records to begin with and that copies of any destroyed documents were likely available elsewhere in city government.

Barankin, who did not work for Brown in Oakland, said that after looking into the issue for several days he believes no crime occurred.

"Copies are around. It ought to be all findable," he said. "No records were improperly disposed of."

He said that he did not know who Duran did or didn't speak with in the city attorney's office.

Public records advocates said the matter raises serious concerns about Brown's ability as attorney general to enforce laws such as the Public Records Act that are designed to ensure government transparency.

"I think people are going to be less willing to believe him (if) he says enforcement of open government laws are a priority," said Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition. "This is very regrettable. The former mayor's official records were not his to throw away. They belong to the citizens of Oakland."

Open government proponents questioned how seriously Brown interprets Proposition 59, which voters approved in 2004. It makes access to government records a constitutional right in California and requires officials to take the broadest possible steps for disclosure.

The Public Records Act was signed into law in 1968 by Gov. Ronald Reagan. It states that "access to information concerning the conduct of the people's business is a fundamental and necessary right of every person in this state." It requires the government to provide unfettered access to any information recorded "upon any tangible thing ... regardless of the manner in which the record has been stored."

Brown is one of California's most veteran elected officials, having served eight years as governor, four as secretary of state and eight years as Oakland mayor. He is the son of former Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown and unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president three times.

Early last week, city officials said none of Brown's records could be found.

Then on Thursday, some of Brown's e-mails were located by the city's information technology department and were close to being deleted under a city policy that they be held for 90 days after an official leaves office. MediaNews immediately filed a Public Records Act request for them.

On Friday, a binder containing Brown's appointments to city boards and commissions was located.

Lawyers who specialize in public records law said it is nonsensical to believe that Brown didn't produce many public records as mayor or didn't have a responsibility to make sure they were properly maintained.

"It baffles the imagination" to claim that a mayor's office doesn't both generate and receive documents on a daily basis that have to be retained and available for public review under state law and Oakland's Sunshine Ordinance, said Terry Francke, the general counsel of Californians Aware, a government watchdog group.

Duran and Grenell said they believe that copies of the records they threw away are available elsewhere in the city bureaucracy.

But Francke, a longtime public records attorney, says officials cannot legally remove public records under the assumption that copies might exist elsewhere.

Under that premise, he said, "everyone can say, 'Someone else has a copy, so I'm going to throw mine away.' The Public Records Act doesn't operate that way."

Tom Newton, the general counsel of the California Newspaper Publisher's Association, agreed.

State law defining a public record "is very broad," Newton said. "Anything hand-written. Anything typed, or photocopied or faxed. Letters. Words. Pictures. Maps."

As attorney general, Brown needs to be "the exemplar of proper behavior associated with public access laws," Newton said.

Morodomi said records from Brown's office that should have been retained would include "legislative history, how deals were done, things that would help the functioning of Oakland city government."

For example, Ralph Kanz, the conservation director of the Alameda Creek Alliance and a former city ethics commission member, asked the city for correspondence between Brown and a developer. Kanz has filed several such requests in the past year for records about a four-lot subdivision he is concerned about because an endangered plant can be found on the site.

On March 9, Kanz received a terse reply to his request: "No records of former Mayor Brown were left behind," wrote Abney, the public records coordinator on Morodomi's staff.

Kanz said the response mystified him and said he has serious concerns about access to records to which the public is entitled.

"It should be investigated by someone isolated from the politics of this," he said.

Brown's office produced correspondence under public records requests in the past. In 2001, two years into his first term as mayor, it released to the Times dozens of letters written to Brown on the idea of an Indian casino on the former Oakland Army base.

The letters' authors ranged from former Alameda County Sheriff Charles Plummer to representatives of casino mogul Donald Trump.

More current issues in which Brown has been heavily involved include his development of an ordinance in June and July 2005 that made attending a reckless driving "sideshow" a criminal offense. He was also deeply involved in the push to restore the Fox Theater and to find a new location for one of the charter schools he founded, the Oakland School for the Arts.

Francke and Newton said it is documents pertaining to issues such as those that the Public Record Act requires a mayor's office to maintain.

"We don't know where the records are," Morodomi said.

City Clerk LaTonda Simmons said records from Brown's office should have been turned over to her but were not.

"That's a good question," she said when asked if the records exist and where they are kept. "An officer exiting the organization would need to turn their records over to the city clerk. I don't have them."

Neither does current Mayor Ron Dellums, his spokesman Mike Healy, said.

"We don't know where they are. None of it was here when we got here," Healy said.

The Oakland Sunshine Ordinance, a local law placing some higher level of public notice on official action than state law requires, does not address records retention concerning officials leaving office. The commission's sunshine committee is weighing whether to require the retention of records longer than the two years required by state law.

Among public documents that were found after MediaNews inquired about Brown's records were his e-mails.

Oakland has a poor e-mail storage system, but, Morodomi said, "We have been advising our clients to print out and file e-mail. If we have e-mails and they are between Brown and the man in the moon, they are disclosable."

Brown often used an e-mail address on his personal Web site rather than his city account. But a forwarding system was set up that allowed the city to capture copies. Bob Glaze, the city's chief technology officer, said e-mails were found dating to 2004.

The normal policy is to delete e-mails 90 days after an official leaves city government, Glaze said. That directly conflicts with state law requiring that records be retained for two years, records lawyers said.

That is the type of issue that will be addressed by the records retention task force that the city attorney is forming, Morodomi said. The task force will also examine the retention of paper records.

When Mayor Elihu Harris left office in 1999, he turned over dozens of boxes of public records to the city clerk and others to the city-owned African-American Museum and Library.

"There are boxes and boxes after eight years," Harris said.