List of applicants for a public entity’s general manager
Q: A municipal water district hired a new general manager. A board member told me they had “about 20” applicants, and the list would be reduced to a few who would be interviewed. Are names of all who applied open to the public? Are names of those on the short list who were interviewed open to the public?
A: No court has yet addressed the issue of what kind of information about government job applicants is public. You could make a request for the information you seek pursuant to the California Public Records Act, with the caveat that you may face objections such as the ones outlined below.
The government agency might raise an argument under Wilson v. Superior Court, 51 Cal. App. 4th 1136 (1997) that the job applications are protected from disclosure under the deliberative process exemption (section 6255 of the California Public Records Act) on the grounds that the job applications are predecisional documents whose purpose is to aid the municipal water district in selecting appointees.
Depending on the information sought in the job applications, the applications may contain information protected by the constitutional right of privacy or the privilege for official information submitted in confidence under California Evidence Code section 1040, unless a court were to find that there was an overriding public interest in disclosure created by the particular circumstances. Whether the government agency releases the requested information may depend on whether the applicants have asked for, or applied upon, assurances of confidential treatment normally accorded to the employment processes.
For your information, generally speaking, under section 6254(c) of the California Public Records Act, certain personnel files are protected from disclosure under the personal privacy exemption. However, with respect to (already hired) public employees, the kind of information that would be included in a resume, curriculum vitae or job application to demonstrate a person’s fitness for his or her job, in terms of education, training, or work experience, is not a matter of personal privacy. The California Court of Appeal has held in Eskaton Monterey Hospital v. Myers, 134 Cal. App. 3d 788, 794 (1982) that “information as to the education, training, experience, awards, previous positions and publications of the (employee) . . . is routinely presented in both professional and social settings, is relatively innocuous and implicates no applicable privacy or public policy exemption.” However, the Eskaton case does not require the disclosure of government job applications.