By Alec Regimbal, SFGATE

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/top-shasta-official-may-have-broken-state-laws-18563995.php

Three months ago, I emailed Shasta County Board Chair Patrick Jones a list of straightforward questions about a board resolution he’d sponsored, which allowed county officials to ignore state laws they felt were in violation of the Second Amendment.

I wasn’t hoping for much; the resolution was symbolic, since county governments don’t have the power to overturn state laws, and the Shasta board is known for its exceedingly contentious relationship with journalists. I certainly wasn’t expecting the board chair to send me an email telling me to “drop dead” from his county account.

I wrote about the curt response, prompting both amusement and concern from Shasta County residents. One woman even sent me a photo of herself in a shirt with the full text of his email — “Drop dead, Chair Jones” — printed across the front. But the most consequential feedback came a few days later, when a source told me they’d filed a public records request for the email and had been told the county had no record of the exchange.

Deleting that email would likely violate state records laws, which require public officials to keep most work-related communications for at least two years and release them if a member of the public asks, according to Jerry Flanagan, an attorney for public advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, and Sean McMorris, a researcher at California Common Cause. California law defines “public records” as “any writing containing information relating to the conduct of the public’s business,” and states that “access to information concerning the conduct of the people’s business is a fundamental and necessary right of every person in this state.”

On Aug. 7, I filed my own request asking for the exchange, which Flanagan and McMorris told me in their view was a clear example of a public record as an exchange between a reporter and a public official. Sure enough, that same day, the county responded that no relevant records were available.

To make sure the disappearance of the “drop dead” email wasn’t a one-off, I filed a request in October asking for any emails sent to and from Jones from SFGATE reporters over the last year, which should have turned up several emails. Again, the county replied that there were no such records.

“These transparency laws exist, to one, allow the people to participate in government, and two, to hold their representatives accountable for their actions,” McMorris told me. “… If you take the accountability away, if you take the transparency away, you diminish the democratic process.”

The disappearance of those emails, while insignificant on their own, fits into a troubling pattern of anti-democratic behavior in Shasta County. The sparsely populated mountain region, located a few hours north of Sacramento, has become infamous as a hotbed for conservative extremism; last year, the New York Times described it as “The California County Where MAGA Took Control.”

Of Shasta County’s five-person Board of Supervisors, four are staunch conservatives. Jones, who was appointed chair this year, has been at the center of the county’s lurch further right: He publicly backed a recall effort organized against three of his more moderate colleagues, alleging they didn’t do enough to resist state mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has been a standard-bearer for local election conspiracy theories. Board meetings themselves are often raucous and chaotic, and it’s not unusual to see the public cleared from the room after a meeting spirals out of control.

The tipster and the experts I spoke with said the disappearance of the email should be cause for concern. But California doesn’t impose any criminal penalties for violating the state’s public records laws, which means that — at least for now — there are no legal repercussions for flouting the law.

I sent Jones several interview requests asking what happened to the “drop dead” email, all of which he ignored. Acting Shasta County general counsel Matthew McOmber also did not reply to multiple requests for comment. Voicemails left with them went unreturned.

‘None, thanks Chair Jones’

Jones and his conservative allies on the Board of Supervisors have alarmed county residents and state lawmakers alike with extreme moves, including terminating the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems over widely debunked claims that the company’s voting machines were rigged for Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election.

In a May interview with The Nation, Jones called the county’s political shift over the past three years a “course correction” that was “long overdue.” In that same interview, he said that newspapers “aren’t worth new piss.” Jones has also made it clear that he is comfortable ignoring laws with which he disagrees, as reflected by his sponsoring of the Second Amendment resolution I emailed him to ask about in the first place.

After the county told me there was no record of Jones’ “drop dead” email, I filed another records request asking for any emails between Jones and the county’s records officers related to my first request. This time, I actually got a response: Emails revealing that, shortly after I sent my first request, John Sitka — the county’s primary records officer — forwarded it to Jones, and asked if he had any records that fit the bill. His response? “None, thanks Chair Jones.”

I followed up with Sitka, whose official title is the deputy clerk of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, to understand the county policy around records. He told me that Shasta County employees who respond to records requests don’t have the ability to search for records on the back end themselves.

“In short, we’re relying on the subjects of the requests to provide responsive records but the Clerk of the Board cannot directly confirm nor validate if the subject is necessarily accurate and thorough on their responsiveness,” Sitka wrote in an email.

This differs from other agencies across the nation, which often give records officers tools that allow them to scour email systems and databases themselves, rather than relying on government employees to be transparent about information they might have a personal reason to keep out of public hands.

The fact that Shasta County relies on individuals to search their own emails, and has no mechanisms for oversight, is of concern to Victoria Baranetsky, general counsel at the Center for Investigative Reporting.

“There is a preternatural tendency for people to want to hide embarrassing information. And that is a historical fact,” Baranetsky told me. “That’s what those laws are meant to protect against.”

‘Government by the people, for the people’

It’s unfortunately not uncommon for government officials and elected leaders to violate records laws and avoid accountability. Michael Morisy, co-founder of the public records nonprofit MuckRock, told me that, in his experience, officials violating records laws might indicate a pattern, or suggest there’s “something else there that is worth digging into.”

McMorris, the researcher at California Common Cause, agreed that violations of records laws may point to the possibility of a wider pattern, but said it’s up to the public to determine what the disappearance of public records means to them.

“Is it not a big deal? Is it an extremely big deal? And does it mean that it’s potentially representative of a pattern moving forward? Or even with past behavior?” McMorris said. “We don’t know. But we, as the public, can certainly speculate and formulate our own opinions, regardless of what the law is.”

There are no criminal penalties for violating the California Public Records Act, a fact that has been widely lambasted by transparency advocates. There’s only one real potential downfall for an agency that illegally withholds records: If someone sues them and wins, the court can order the agency to cover everyone’s legal fees. That differs from statessuch as Connecticut and Arkansas, where violations constitute misdemeanors that can come with fines and a small amount of jail time.

However, being ordered to pay legal fees can be a real blow to local governments — especially smaller local governments — if they were to lose a public records case in court. Last month, the city of San Jose agreed to pay $500,000 in legal fees to the San José Spotlight and the First Amendment Coalition, a government transparency advocacy group, after the two won a lawsuit against the city for its handling of public records.

A 2017 bill authored by former state Assemblymember Rob Bonta, now the attorney general, would have allowed the state to assess as much as $5,000 in fines on agencies that were found to have violated the law, but the measure was vetoed by former Gov. Jerry Brown.

Without any criminal penalties in place, public officials are unlikely to face any real repercussions for their handling of public records. In fact, we’ve seen what happens when a media outlet actually takes the county to court.

The Record Searchlight, another local outlet that covers Shasta, sued the county in 2022 after it refused to turn over hundreds of pages of records related to an internal investigation into the sheriff’s office. A superior court judge had to order the county to release the records in three separate rulings before the county finally turned them over to the paper. Before the final ruling in July, the judge, Stephen Baker, disclosed in open court that Jones had called him to “apologize” and invited him to an upcoming town hall meeting — a call that Baker described as creating an “awkward” situation.

Transparency laws exist to keep a government accountable to the people it serves, but they only work if they’re actually followed and enforced, McMorris said.

“Ethics laws cannot be less-than laws,” he said. “It gets at the root of ‘government by the people, for the people.’ If people are going to have a say, and if they’re going to be able to participate in their government effectively and hold their representatives accountable, they have to be able to access public records.”