The department in charge of homelessness in San Francisco was called out Wednesday night for failing to make complete and timely disclosure of public records requested by Bay City News.
The city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, the body charged with enforcing the rules about disclosure of public records, voted unanimously that the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) had violated the city’s “Sunshine Ordinance.”
The dispute began in May of 2023 when BCN lodged public records requests with HSH for information related to a “vehicle triage center” in the city’s Bayview District and a trailer encampment called “Site F” on property of the Port of San Francisco.
BCN reporter Joe Dworetzky had been covering HSH for months and had written a number of stories as part of a series called “Giving Shelter” which focused, among other things, on HSH’s spending on homelessness in the city.
The records requests were filed about a month before the Board of Supervisors was scheduled to hold hearings on HSH’s budget. At that time HSH was seeking to increase its budget, even though many other departments were facing budget cuts. (The supervisors ultimately approved a $40 million increase to $713 million.)
BCN wanted the requested information promptly so it would have time to write about what it discovered before HSH’s budget hearings — typically a time when supervisors can ask agencies hard questions about their spending and operations.
Under the ordinance, HSH was required to produce the requested documents in 10 days, at least in the absence of a claim that they were exempt from disclosure. HSH made no such claim and on the 10th day it produced a number of documents, but said that it was continuing to search for more and would produce them on a “rolling basis,” if, as, and when they became available.
Thereafter, HSH produced more documents on an irregular pace and did not make final production until two months after the original request. By that time, the budget hearings had come and gone.
Some of the documents produced after the budget hearings had information that was potentially damaging to HSH. For example, information that HSH was exploring giving the trailers that housed the homeless at Site F to another city — despite the thousands of unsheltered people on San Francisco’s streets.
BCN challenged HSH’s compliance with the ordinance and alleged that HSH had intentionally used “rolling production” as a strategy to evade the ordinance’s requirement of open, full, and timely disclosure.
In a series of filings with the task force, BCN asserted that HSH improperly delayed disclosure of inconvenient or damaging information until it was no longer actionable, as happened in the specific situation which was the basis of the hearing.
At the hearing Wednesday night, BCN presented the case that HSH’s disclosure improperly evaded the deadlines in the ordinance and urged the task force to address HSH’s conduct, both as it applied the specific situation and what he characterized as a regular “tactic” that HSH uses to control the flow of damaging information.
The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force has an interesting origin story.
The task force is an 11-member body appointed by the Board of Supervisors that, among other things, hears disclosure disputes. The ordinance specifies that the seats on the Task Force are to be filled by journalists, citizens interested in public access, and a consumer advocate.
California — like many states — has a public records law that sets the baseline rules on disclosure of public records for most public bodies in the state. However, California’s law specifically says that local jurisdictions that want to adopt their own laws to enhance disclosure are allowed to do so as those laws require more and/or faster disclosure.
In 1999, the citizens of San Francisco took the state up on that invitation. By a vote of 95,616 to 68,399, the voters approved Proposition G that amended and gave teeth to the city’s existing disclosure law.
The resulting “Sunshine Ordinance” added broad categories of records to the list of what must be disclosed upon request. The ordinance also set strict deadlines applicable to city agencies when producing requested documents, allowing the public and the media to get information at a time when it could be acted on.
The ordinance reads as a paean to the importance of open and transparent government and curtailing secret deals and hidden operations.
The ordinance recognized that public records requests were a fundamental tool to be used so that the public could get to the primary source materials for determining whether government spending and management was in the interest of the public.
The ordinance begins with a manifesto: “Elected officials, commissions, boards, councils and other agencies of the City and County exist to conduct the people’s business. The people do not cede to these entities the right to decide what the people should know about the operations of local government.”
The ordinance makes its expectations explicit: “Public officials who attempt to conduct the public’s business in secret should be held accountable for their actions.”
Dylan Schneider, HSH’s manager of legislative affairs, appeared at the hearing to defend the department’s conduct. She said that she supervised the official who actually handled the production at issue. Schneider justified HSH’s production schedule because she said that BCN’s reporter made numerous record requests, sometimes seeking voluminous documents, and that in some cases the department responded quickly.
She contended that “HSH takes our responsibility to comply with public records requests under the Sunshine Ordinance very seriously,” and asserted that the department must carefully review and redact records to make sure they do not identify their “clients’” personal information.
However, when questioned, she said that she was unable to provide specifics about the issues arising in the production because the official who was involved retired.
She said the official retired the day after a committee of the task force held a preliminary hearing on the issues in September 2023. After the hearing, the committee recommended that the full task force hear the BCN petition and find a violation of the ordinance.
After the parties’ presentations, the members of the task force had little trouble in concluding that HSH had violated the ordinance by not making full and timely production, but disagreed among themselves about where the limitations are on rolling production. They asked the deputy city attorney who attended the meeting to give them further advice.
Statements in support of BCN’s position came from a number of interested observers, including Curtis Sparrer, the president of San Francisco Press Club, Jay Harris, a former publisher of Mother Jones, and Jay Hamilton, head of Stanford University’s journalism program and the author of “Democracy’s Detectives,” an award-winning book on investigative journalism.
Other letters came from law professors and practicing lawyers, some of whom recounted their own experiences with HSH’s violations of the ordinance.
Hamilton’s letter said that in researching his book, he found that one of the hurdles that investigative reporters face in reporting investigative stories is “government officials who try to block access to the records they should be willing to release.”
He observed that “if justice delayed can be justice denied, the same reasoning applies to the timely release of documents.”
While the task force ruled in favor of the reporter there was an element of irony. Because of the task force’s workload and meeting schedule, its decision came almost a year after the records requests were first made.