San Diego County uses worn-out excuse of attorney-client privilege to keep investigation report secret

Did gifts cause CCS therapists to favor certain vendors of wheelchairs and other medical devices?

The Investigation the County Doesn't Want You to See
By WILL CARLESS
Jan. 4, 2009

At some point in 2007, a whistleblower at California Children's Services, a program run by the county of San Diego that provides wheelchairs and other medical devices to children with physical disabilities, filed a complaint with the county alleging improprieties within the program.

The county launched a widespread investigation into the allegations that continued for at least 13 months in 2007 and 2008, records show. The investigation led to disciplinary action against county employees and changes to the county's ethics policies, but the report the investigators produced, and all the information it contains, is being kept a secret.

... Minutes from meetings show staff discussed allegations that therapists at the CCS program received gifts from vendors in violation of county ethics rules and may have favored certain vendors over others because of those gifts.

But exactly what was alleged, who was investigated and how deep any problems at the program went, are all things the county's top officials have decided shouldn't be released to the public...

One public records expert said attorney-client privilege is consistently used by public agencies to avoid releasing embarrassing documents, and pointed out that the county could chose to waive its privilege and make the document public.

The county has also refused to provide a copy of the report to the state of California, which provides the bulk of the $20 million budget for the CCS program. A spokesman for the California Department of Health Care Services, which oversees the CCS program, said county officials told the state that the investigation only concerned "personnel issues" and that they had not found any evidence that the program had been negatively impacted by the individuals investigated.

...A county spokeswoman said in an e-mail that the medical therapists work with the family's physician to provide the best piece of equipment available to the child from a list of possible vendors.

The selection of vendors, and the possible undue influence placed on county therapists by vendors who gave gifts to county staff, appear from documents to have been the subject of the internal investigation sparked by the whistleblower...

...In San Diego, public bodies regularly hand over such reports and documents.

But, in response to a request from voiceofsandiego.org media partner NBC 7/39 for the investigative report, County Counsel John Sansone claimed that the document fell within one of the law's exemptions and therefore did not have to be provided...

If it weren't for recent stories about Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens, I'd be surprised Alaska is on the list

North Dakota Tops State Corruption List
By John Fritze,
USA Today
Dec. 11, 2008

Federal authorities arrested Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich Tuesday...

"If it isn't the most corrupt state in the United States it's certainly one hell of a competitor," Robert Grant, head of the FBI's Chicago office, said Tuesday.

On a per-capita basis, however, Illinois ranks 18th for the number of public corruption convictions the federal government has won from 1998 through 2007, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Department of Justice statistics.
Louisiana, Alaska and North Dakota all fared worse than the Land of Lincoln in that analysis.

Alaska narrowly ousted Republican Sen. Ted Stevens in the election in November after he was convicted of not reporting gifts from wealthy friends. In Louisiana, Democratic Rep. William Jefferson was indicted in 2007 on racketeering and bribery charges after the FBI said it found $90,000 in marked bills in his freezer. Jefferson, who has maintained his innocence and will soon go to trial, lost his seat to a Republican this year.

But North Dakota?

Morrison said the state has encouraged bad government practices in some cases by weakening disclosure laws. North Dakota does not require legislative or statewide candidates to disclose their campaign expenses.

The analysis does not include corruption cases handled by state law enforcement and it considers only convictions. Corruption may run more rampant in some states but go undetected.

Michael Johnston is a political science professor at Colgate University in New York — which is ranked just after Illinois for corruption convictions. Johnston, who has studied political corruption for 30 years, said places such as Illinois gain a bad reputation that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Public Records Request for CCDC's Nancy Graham e-mails finally granted, sort of

Link: 404
Voice of San Diego
by Rob Davis
November 25, 2008

E-mailWatch has ended. The Centre City Development Corp. recently turned over one final batch of e-mails sent or received by its former president, Nancy Graham.

We sought all of her e-mails after April 1, looking to determine what Graham had communicated as questions began being raised about her financial relationship with developers with business pending downtown. As my investigation continued, what did she tell people around her?

Turns out, not much. Or at least not much that was disclosed in the e-mails I fought for months to obtain.


Here's how the e-mails look by the numbers:



5,205: E-mails Graham sent or received between April 1 and her July 24 resignation.


0: E-mails that CCDC's attorneys from the Los Angeles-based law firm Kane Ballmer Berkman said were public records before our fight began in September.


4,388: E-mails that CCDC's attorneys ended up turning over after two months of back-and-forth.


413: E-mails that were spam or duplicates.


404: E-mails that were withheld and kept secret.

CCDC attorney Murray Kane offered this breakdown of why the 404 e-mails were withheld: 260 were attorney-client privileged; 35 were part of the deliberative process; 40 were confidential or related to on-going negotiations; 40 contained personnel, medical or "similar privacy matters"; 30 were preliminary notes or drafts not kept in the regular course of business.

CCDC withheld some responses to e-mails it disclosed. For example, Richard Ledford, a local lobbyist, sent Graham a May 13 e-mail entitled "Love That Press". It was written four days after our initial story documenting Graham's past business relationship with the affiliate of a developer with business pending downtown. The story was the first in that led to Graham's resignation and misdemeanor criminal charges being filed against her.

"I leave the country for a couple of weeks and you hit the press..." Ledford wrote. "you just gotta stay out of trouble! Ok, now don't shout, but my St. Paul client wanted to know if there are any fully entitled condo projects for sale in the redevelopment area. Yeah yeah yeah... don't start on me!"

Graham replied the same day. CCDC never provided her reply or the specific legal reason it was withheld.

For those who have been following E-mailWatch, at least two changes have resulted from our pursuit of Graham's e-mails.

Fred Maas, the CCDC board chairman, discovered from the e-mails that Graham had bought $18,000 in office furniture for CCDC's move to new offices earlier this year. That furniture is now supposed to be returned and replaced with less-costly furniture.


Maas said that CCDC is also taking steps to streamline the disclosure of e-mails requested in the future. Maas said CCDC's policy starting in 2009 will be to disclose all e-mails sent to staff members. Any e-mails containing confidential information will be directed to a special e-mail account; everything will be released otherwise, Maas said.



-- ROB DAVIS

SEDC's Regina Petty has written the best denial of a Public Records Act request I've ever seen

Regina Petty, attorney for the Southeast Economic Development Corporation, has written a heated, angry letter. I much prefer it to the cold, disinterested letters of refusal I have received from attorneys Daniel Shinoff and Diane Crosier when I was trying to get the invoices for Daniel Shinoff's bills to San Diego County Office of Education. (Yes, at one time Diane Crosier put Shinoff in charge of denying my requests for Shinoff's records!)

Here is Regina Petty's letter:

I Am Sorry, for You
Voice of San Diego
By Regina Petty
San Diego

Oct. 20, 2008

I am sorry when I must inform a person requesting records that the Public Records Act expressly exempts from disclosure privileged information.

[Blogger's note: You mean you wish you didn't have to come up with a bunch of bogus excuses when someone makes a legitimate public records request.]

I am sorry that voiceofsandiego.org was dissatisfied in July 2007 when it promptly received a summary of the amounts the Southeastern Economic Development paid to my firm for legal services in response to a Public Records Act request.

[Come on. You knew they'd be dissatisfied. You intentionally left out the information they wanted.]

I am sorry that I responded by agreeing to perform the task of redacting privileged and confidential information from multiple years of statements for legal services even though there is no legal authority requiring that I do so for this type of document.

[Right. You could have just copied the documents without redacting them.]

I am sorry that in 2007 no one from voiceofsandiego.org ever came to review the redacted statements for legal services which took some time to prepare.

[You say (below) that you couldn't find the documents recently. When did they get lost? Was there ever anything for VOSD to look at? How severe what the redactation job you did on the documents?]

I am sorry that voiceofsandiego.org's attention to its own Public Records Act requests unexpectedly vacillates from indifference to exclusive focus.

[What?!? You mean you thought they were going to let you off the hook, and then they didn't? Yes, I guess that would be a disappointment.]

I am sorry that when voiceofsandiego.org recently renewed its request for the records the SEDC staff was unable to immediately locate the documents from 2007 so that the redaction task had to be performed again.

[Yes. That's too bad.]

I am sorry that there were extra demands placed on my time in September due to the replacement of more than half of the board members of the SEDC.

[If you had given better legal advice, there wouldn't have been so many board members losing their positions.]

I am sorry that there were extra demands placed on my time in September because of the additional board and committee meetings that were held by the SEDC.

[See previous]

I am sorry my highest priority in September was attending to the needs of a Board of Directors managing a major organizational transition.

[Transition? You mean the people to whom you gave legal advice got caught carrying on questionable relationships with developers, and were forced out?]

I am sorry that my daughter's desire that I accompany her as she relocated to France was inconvenient for voiceofsandiego.org.

[I'm sure VOSD would have been perfectly happy if your secretary had simply copied all your invoices and turned them over while you were gone. But that would have been inconvenient for you, right?]

I am sorry that I shortchanged my daughter by delaying the trip to be present for the SEDC Board of Directors meeting on Sept. 24 and limiting the trip to return in time for another agency's board meeting on Oct.2...I am sorry that my presence was required at publicly noticed meetings of the SEDC and other agencies on Oct. 2, 9, 10, 13 and 14 so that Will Carless was unable to determine my whereabouts.

[Sorry, Ms. Petty. There's no way you will be able to make Will Carless the bad guy here. Your presence was required because of a scandal you helped create.]

I am sorry that Will Carless called me at my home on Oct. 9 while I was attending a publicly noticed meeting at the SEDC.

[See above.]

I am sorry that Will Carless has repeatedly falsely claimed that responses to Public Records Act requests were late.

[I'm a whole lot more likely to believe Will Carless than to believe Carolyn Smith's lawyer. He has no motivation to lie; you do.]

I am sorry that Will Carless is a bully.

[This sounds like blaming the victim. You wanted to violate the California Public Records Act, so you call Will Carless a bully for demanding that you obey the law! You sound just like Daniel Shinoff.]

I am sorry that Will Carless did not notice that his abusive conduct caused me to stop taking or returning his telephone calls in early August.

[Or did you stop taking his calls because you wanted to hide your billing records?]

I am sorry that Will Carless cannot discern any real news to use for his blog in light of the global financial, political and social issues of the day.

[The SEDC fell apart due to the efforts of individuals to enrich themself by abusing the system. Isn't it newsworthy to find out how much its lawyer was being paid? The global financial crisis seems to be the result of the efforts of individuals to enrich themself by abusing the system. Credit Default Swaps were invented because individual investors wanted to get rich faster, and the problem was that these instuments hid the identity of the seller. Why didn't the SEC jump on this problem? Probably for the same reason that you, Regina Petty, didn't jump on the problems at SEDC. My guess is that individual lawyers at the SEC thought they could help out their greedy investor friends and get away with it. Individual public entity lawyers at both the SEC and the SEDC are an appropriate subject of investigative journalists.]

(End of Regina Petty's letter and of my responses.]

VOSD Editor's Note: Will Carless has doggedly, yet professionally, pursued open records and answers from an agency that has been extremely reluctant to provide either. While this can sometimes be a tense effort, we stand behind his work.

SEDC refuses public records requests

SEDC Won't Produce Documents
August 29, 2008
Voice of San Diego
by Will Carless

The Southeastern Economic Development Corp. has, for almost two months, refused to provide documents and information that would shed light on when and how its various clandestine bonus programs were introduced.

SEDC President Carolyn Y. Smith has consistently claimed that the bonus programs pre-date her arrival at SEDC, and that she was merely following agency protocol when she approved hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses for herself and her staff.

But the agency has repeatedly declined to provide any documentation that would prove such claims. And a story in The San Diego Union-Tribune earlier this month quoted Smith’s three predecessors at the agency as saying that they do not remember any such bonus programs being in place during their tenure...