While Los Angeles city departments follow guidelines for preserving records, it doesn’t appear that City Council and mayoral offices have followed those same rules, city employees said this week.
The issue came to light after former Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge acknowledged that he didn’t preserve city documents upon leaving office in 2015. Former Councilman Bernard Parks, who also left in 2015, also didn’t retain some documents, his former chief of staff said in an interview this week.
Stephanie Scher, a retired attorney for the cities of Bellflower, Baldwin Park and Palos Verdes Estates, said the lack of retention raises legal issues because of both state and L.A. city laws. Such laws dictate that records must be preserved for a certain amount of time.
“You got watchdog groups that are going to be very unhappy about the city destroying public records,” said Scher, who was one of the first attorneys to raise issues about the destruction of the documents.
The Los Angeles District Attorney’s office could try and prosecute the individuals who sought the destruction of LaBonge documents, she said.
The office of City Councilman David Ryu, who represents District 4, last week made public 35 boxes of documents belonging to Ryu’s predecessor, LaBonge. The release of the documents — marked for destruction — highlighted the lack of preservation required by the city.
In releasing the documents, Ryu’s team emphasized that they weren’t accusing LaBonge of any misdeeds, only bringing to light the need for better citywide rules for preserving records.
Los Angeles department heads are responsible for keeping records retention schedules and laying out a process for preserving records. A record could be a permit for a new downtown building, for instance.
But city elected officials, such as council members and the mayor, haven’t followed those procedures.
The last council member to submit a records retention schedule was City Councilman Marvin Braude, City Clerk Holly Wolcott said. Braude left the council in 1997.
Asked if council members and the mayor are required under current law to retain official records, Wolcott said: “We believe they are.”
Terry Francke, general counsel with Californians Aware, said the lack of record-keeping could result in lawsuit against the city brought by taxpayers. The crux of the lawsuit would be that the city was abusing taxpayer dollars by violating state or federal law.
Some City Council members have sent files to be retained. Since 2000, 20 council members have sent files to be preserved, said Todd Gaydowski, the city’s records management officer and head of the city clerk’s Records Management Divisions.
It wasn’t immediately clear what was contained in the files sent by those council offices.
The issue of the destroyed LaBonge documents came to light in a lawsuit brought by attorney Robert Silverstein, who is suing the city over the approval of a Sherman Oaks development. Silverstein is seeking documents from LaBonge’s office held by the city.
Plaintiffs in other lawsuits brought against the city over land-use projects in Council District 4 while LaBonge was in office could also ask the court to weigh in on the issue of missing documents, Silverstein said.
Silverstein is asking for an independent investigation into what happened to the documents in LaBonge‘s office and the destruction of documents at City Hall.
The city does retain emails from all city employees dating back to 2010, said Ted Ross, general manager of the city’s technology department. All employee emails are kept, including deleted emails, Ross said.
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