Public record quest: California attorney general to probe shredding of documents relating to Palin speaker’s fee

SACRAMENTO – Students at Cal State Stanislaus discovered evidence that documents related to an upcoming speaking engagement by Sarah Palin were shredded and dumped after the university claimed that no public documents existed, a state senator said on Tuesday.

The students appeared at a Sacramento news conference with state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, Tuesday morning and said they found the documents on Friday in a trash bin outside the university’s administration building in Turlock.

On Tuesday afternoon, Attorney General Jerry Brown said he was launching a “broad investigation” into the alleged dumping of documents and to examine finances of the CSU Stanislaus Foundation, which is hosting the June 25 event featuring the former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate.

“This is not about Sarah Palin,” Brown said in a statement. “She has every right to speak at a university event…. The issues are public disclosure and financial accountability in organizations embedded in state-run universities.”

The CSU Stanislaus Foundation is a private, nonprofit entity that raises money to supplement state funding to the campus and has offices in the university’s administration building.

Among the documents found by the students outside the building were five intact pages of a contract for a “speaker” who will be traveling from Anchorage. Although the speaker is not identified by name, Yee said it is clearly Palin’s contract despite the university’s denial last week that it had any documents related to Palin’s engagement.

“I never thought I would have to relive Watergate again, but to some extent this is our little Watergate in the state of California,” said Yee, who said it was a “dark day” for the CSU system and especially CSU Stanislaus.

Last month, both the university and the foundation refused to say how much Palin was being paid for her appearance, and Yee argued that the public has a right to know, particularly because CSU has been raising student fees. The portion of the recovered contract does not include the speaker’s fee.

The university said the CSU Stanislaus Foundation contracted Palin for the $500-a-plate event and the contract included a privacy clause preventing officials from disclosing the speaker’s fee. Furthermore, the university said the foundation is not required to abide by the laws of the state Public Records Act.

Yee argues that the CSU Stanislaus Foundation includes university officials, is located on university property and is so intrinsically linked to the public institution that the contract is a public record. He’s sponsoring a bill that would require private university foundations, including the CSU Stanislaus Foundation, to comply with the Public Records Act.

Foundation President Matt Swanson said the organization has never denied that a contract exists and said he does not know of anyone being told to destroy documents.

“From our standpoint, no one did anything wrong,” Swanson said. He said that the event is being paid for entirely with private money, including renting a venue from the university, and that the foundation is exempt from public records requests. The foundation says the event will raise $100,000 to $200,000 for the university.

“It’s a fundraiser, that’s the bottom line,” he said. He said the foundation was getting “wrapped up in a maelstrom of politics related to the passage of a bill.”

Russ Giambelluca, CSU Stanislaus vice president of business and finance, said no one was “instructed to destroy vital documents on anyone’s behalf.”

The students who found the partial contract said they also believed the university foundation should be subject to open records requirements.

“We just want to hold people accountable. This is our campus … and unfortunately there is no way to know right now if ethical things are happening or unethical things are happening,” said Ashli Briggs, a 23-year-old junior studying political science. “What we seek is transparency. We want to know what’s going on.”

Briggs and Alicia Lewis, a 26-year-old senior also studying political science, said they were tipped off that university officials were disposing of documents on Friday, a furlough day on campus and one day after Yee asked the attorney general to look into the matter.

The two students, along with several others, went to the locked administration building and said they saw cars of university staffers in the lot and another student carrying documents from the building to a garbage bin. They collected that paper and found part of the contract, along with other documents, some of which were shredded.

Foundation documents were mixed in with official university documents, the students said. They said they had followed developments with the foundation on campus and reached out to Yee because of his work on the issue.

The contract pages found intact, released by Yee’s office, detail travel and accommodation requirements for the speaker. Those include two first-class airline tickets from Anchorage, along with two business-class tickets between California and another destination in the lower 48 states. They also specify the speaker have a one-bedroom suite and two single rooms in a deluxe hotel.

The contract, dated March 16, is from the Washington Speakers Bureau, which represents Palin. Officials at the bureau could not be reached for comment. The contract states that any public disclosure of contents, either negligent or intentional, would be a breach of the contract and “the breaching party may be held liable.”

A CSU Stanislaus spokeswoman did not return multiple requests for comment on the matter.

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