In blue California, local officials embrace Trumpian qualities of anti-press secrecy | Opinion

National Sunshine Week, which celebrates the importance of openness in government and the public’s right to know, takes place this year from March 16 to 22 amid cloudy political skies from Washington to Sacramento.

On the national scale, President Donald Trump’s political career has been based upon open disdain toward the press and the public’s right to know what its government is doing. Among his latest moves are to bar the Associated Press from accessing White House press events, an example of government favoritism of news outlets — which courts have often struck down.

Closer to home, in Modesto, city officials allegedly ordered employees not to speak to The Modesto Bee in another example of trying to stifle news coverage.

I started my career as a newspaper reporter and have spent almost all of my four-decade legal career as a First Amendment lawyer battling against government officials and agencies who don’t want to provide documents or access to the public and the press.

If there’s one thing officials in both parties almost always agree upon, it’s their preference for secrecy.

On the statewide level, government leaders are generally more subtle than Trump, with most giving at least expressing lip service to openness in government. But while many politicians in California will talk the talk, they often aren’t walking the walk when citizens and reporters seek records under the California Public Records Act.

Too often, the first reaction of California governments when handling records requests is to delay and deflect a request, or attempt to invoke or invent flimsy “exemptions” from disclosure, often to avoid embarrassment and cover up “corruption, incompetence, inefficiency, prejudice and favoritism,” the very evils which the California Supreme Court has stated the public records act was designed to reveal.

Indeed, many of the stories you have read in newspapers like The Sacramento Bee could not have been written without access to public records. Many times, however, that access was secured only after the Bee had to fight back against initial denials of public records act requests. Two recent examples were the Capital Public Radio scandal involving junketeering and self-dealing by a top official, and issues at St. Hope schools where officials appear to have overlooked inappropriate activity, allegedly involving drugs at parties attended by students and staff from the school.

The electronic age has made it easier for government officials to engage in such misbehavior and escape the revelation of shady dealings. While the California Supreme Court held in a 2017 case, City of San Jose v. Superior Court, that public officials’ records dealing with public business are public records even when an employee or official uses their “private” electronic device, many public officials and employees have ignored or openly defied the high court’s decision.

For example, a city councilman in Paso Robles, Chris Bausch, resisted and delayed turning over records from his “private phone,” causing a war of words between the city attorney and Bausch. And when the Natomas Unified School District suffered a data breach in 2024, a former district employee was alleged to have used a “personal” phone account to notify officials. The district then said it couldn’t retrieve records of the notification.

In the San Jose decision regarding public records on personal devices, California’s high court said “agencies can adopt policies that will reduce the likelihood of public records being held in employees’ private accounts,” and “agencies might require that employees use or copy their government accounts for all communications touching on public business,” as federal employees are required to do.

Public officials and employees haven’t scrambled to follow the state Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion and “use or copy” guidance in the eight years since it was issued, however. Bausch, in Paso Robles, and former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs have also used their “private” devices to text about public business and then resisted disclosing the records.

All of this is worth considering in National Sunshine Week. Transparency is the bedrock of democracy, and our state and nation are at great risk of becoming less and less transparent by the day as new barriers confront the press and public access to information. We need accountability now more than ever.

This story was originally published March 13, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "In blue California, local officials embrace Trumpian qualities of anti-press secrecy | Opinion."