By Rick Knee–A Superior Court judge has ordered the San Francisco Ethics Commission to provide a local citizen with two dozen documents regarding proposed city sunshine law enforcement guidelines.
In a ruling issued on Oct. 25 and filed on Oct. 29, Judge Ernest Goldman found that the commission’s executive director, John St. Croix, failed to meet a burden of proof that the documents were exempt from disclosure under attorney-client confidentiality privilege provisions in the city Sunshine Ordinance and the state Public Records Act. St. Croix had argued that the privilege applied because the documents consisted of communications between his and the city attorney’s offices.
Plaintiff Allen Grossman, a San Francisco resident and long-time activist for open government, noted that Sunshine Ordinance Sec. 67.24(b)(1)(iii) establishes disclosability of city attorney’s advice regarding city and state open-meetings and public-records laws and ethics codes.
Though the Sunshine Ordinance (Administrative Code Secs. 67.1 et seq.) established an 11-member task force to monitor city agencies’ compliance with local and state open-meetings and public-records laws, that body has no enforcement authority. When the task force determines that an agency has flouted any sunshine laws, it must ask the Ethics Commission, the Board of Supervisors, the district attorney and/or the state attorney general to enforce the provision(s) found to have been violated.
The task force has sent the vast majority of its enforcement requests to the Ethics Commission. None of the entities with enforcement authority has ever used it, prompting the task force and several local citizens to press the commission to examine its sunshine law enforcement policies and practices and eventually to propose new guidelines.