The Anaheim City Council is set to consider more anti-corruption rules this week, though recent debates about stricter campaign finance regulations went nowhere.

On Tuesday, Sept. 13, council members are scheduled to discuss two new proposals: one that would make it a misdemeanor to knowingly violate Anaheim’s lobbying rules, and another that would require the city to keep most emails of council members, their staff and city management for two years, much longer than some of that correspondence is saved today.

The city has been under increased public scrutiny since May, when the news broke that former Mayor Harry Sidhu was under federal investigation, which was followed by his resignation and put a stop to an almost-baked deal to sell Angel Stadium.

FBI investigators have alleged in court filings Sidhu appeared to try to pass secret information during stadium negotiations, with the intention of seeking $1 million in support for his reelection in November. Sidhu hasn’t been charged with a crime, and his attorney has said a fair and thorough investigation will clear him of those allegations.

Soon after Sidhu stepped down, his close advisor and former Anaheim Chamber of Commerce CEO Todd Ament agreed to plead guilty to several counts of fraud. Among supporting court documents were allegations by investigators that he helped lead a self-described cabal that influenced council decisions in favor of powerful business interests.

Council members have denied being improperly influenced.

Existing rules say anyone who earns more than $500 in one month by lobbying Anaheim must register with the city and file quarterly reports on their activities. Whether they take a lunch meeting with a council member or call the city manager to plug a project, “the citizens of Anaheim have the right to know the identity of interests which attempt to influence decisions by city government, as well as the means employed by those interests,” the lobbying ordinance says.

One proposal the council will consider Tuesday, would raise the stakes for ignoring the rules: it would become a misdemeanor to intentionally violate them by not filing a report, or filing one that’s false or inaccurate, or lying about money earned lobbying in order to skirt the rules.

While no one has been charged with or admitted to this specific kind of wrongdoing, “it was very evident in the affidavit that was publicized that entities in the city were figuring out ways to circumvent the (lobbying) ordinance in order to disguise what they were doing,” said Councilman Avelino Valencia, who requested the changes.

“With a city as large as ours, there’s a lot of moving pieces and anybody working in the public space should be very forward about their interactions with the city,” he added.

Valencia also is suggesting a change that would require the city to retain the emails of council members and their staff and city executives for two years. Unless state law explicitly requires keeping them, emails are currently wiped from city servers after 90 days, and the responsibility is on city officials to evaluate what might be important enough to save.

State law generally requires public records to be kept for two years, and longer in some cases, but the hitch is what’s considered a public record.

“It’s our position that government records should be held for two years at least, and there’s some support in the law for that. However, the (California) Public Records Act itself does not have a retention requirement and there are government agencies that interpret that as a green light to destroy records whenever they think it’s appropriate,” First Amendment Coalition Executive Director David Snyder said.

Anaheim city spokesman Mike Lyster said the city’s policy reflects government trying to adjust to the shift to email as a dominant means of official communication, which creates far more correspondence (and potential public records) than ever before.

Some emails aren’t necessarily public records, like when a city employee asks a colleague to go to lunch, Lyster said. To avoid saving endless gigabytes of correspondence – and the laborious archive searches that public records requests might then require – Anaheim and some other cities put the onus on whoever is in possession of the email to make a judgment call.

“While email is considered transitory, it’s incumbent on all of us to go through and to discern and save what would be a public record for ongoing business of the city,” Lyster said.

When the council considered a “sunshine ordinance” in 2017 that included the 90-day email retention, staff looked at other cities and found policies ranging from 30 to 180 days, Lyster said.

Costa Mesa City Clerk Brenda Green said in her experience, cities’ email retention practices vary widely; her city sticks with a two-year rule to cover all bases.

“All emails are not records,” she said, but “any emails that pertain to city business may be a record that should be retained for two years.”

Valencia said in his experience working for a state assemblyman, the policy for keeping emails was broad, and that’s good for open government.

“If you sent it through a state server on a state email (account), you better be OK with it (being) in writing,” he said.

He’s hoping for unanimous support on Tuesday for his proposed city rule changes, even if it’s difficult to craft an enforceable policy that can reliably capture city officials’ communications on personal phones and email accounts.

“There’s always going to be shortcomings, but I think this is a good step in assuring that elected officials and public servants are required to operate transparently,” he said.

Snyder said without strong records retention policies, including for emails, “the important protections of the Public Records Act loose a lot of meaning. If the record doesn’t exist, then the public can’t see it.”

Related Articles