Mayor Kevin Johnson and his staff use private email for public work—and there's no rule saying they can't
The city of Sacramento has no policies about the use of emails
The Hillary Clinton email controversy brought public attention to an issue that open-government advocates have worried about for years: the widespread use of private emails by government officials to do public business.
The danger is that some government officials will use private email accounts to skirt public-records laws and avoid scrutiny by the media and larger public.
Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson also uses private emails extensively to do city business. In fact, he and his staff have created a sort of parallel email system, not connected to city servers at all.
That’s a big problem, says Jim Ewert, an attorney with the California Newspaper Publishers Association. “The practice essentially guts the California Public Records Act.”
The mayor’s office has refused to answer SN&R’s questions about these private email accounts. And, unlike some other government agencies, the city of Sacramento has no policy at all regarding the use of private email accounts by government officials. In this way, Johnson is exploiting a legal gray area, one which is being fought over in the California Supreme Court right now.
Like all city employees, the mayor and his staff are all assigned official city of Sacramento email addresses. But the mayor’s staff also uses a special set of Gmail accounts to do a lot of city business.
The accounts are private, but all branded with the letters “OMKJ,” for “Office of Mayor Kevin Johnson.” So, the email for Johnson’s chief of staff, Daniel Conway, is daniel.omkj@gmail.com. His press person, Ben Sosenko, is ben.omkj@gmail.com, and so forth.
The mayor himself doesn’t appear to use Gmail, instead preferring to use other email addresses to do some city business. For example, he has in the past used mayorjohnson@kevinjohnson.com. A more recently used address is seven@kevinjohnson.com. (Seven was Johnson’s jersey number in the NBA.)
The mayor’s office won’t say why these accounts are used instead of the official city accounts available, or under what circumstances they are used. Sosenko did not return several calls and did not reply to an emailed list of questions, but sent a statement:
“As has been widely pointed out in the media, elected officials in California have no clear uniform guidelines on the use of email. We look forward to the Legislature addressing this issue.”
But the Legislature is not likely to address the issue any time soon, Ewert said, while the issue is tied up in California courts.
In 2013, the Santa Clara County Superior Court ruled that all emails used by San Jose city officials to conduct city business—even if they are sent using personal phones and private email accounts—were subject to the California Public Records Act. But a year later, the Sixth District Court of Appeal overturned the lower courts’ ruling. And now the case is before the California Supreme Court, which may or may not hear it this year. A decision is more likely sometime in 2016.
In the meantime, “Most state and local agencies are looking at this like it’s the Wild West,” Ewert said.
So, SN&R turned to the Sacramento city clerk for some answers. This paper filed a California Public Records Act request with the clerk’s office for all emails from all “OMKJ” accounts going back two years. The records request also included some basic questions about the use of the accounts, such as the names of the employees using the accounts and the number of emails generated.
Many of those questions could not be answered, because the emails are not directly accessible by the city clerk. Instead, the messages are on Google servers, in accounts controlled entirely by the mayor’s staff.
The city clerk’s office asked for and acquired 371 pages of emails from the mayor’s staff and turned them over to SN&R as part of a request. Much of what the city has turned over so far concerns the Kings arena. And much of it is information that was already turned over as evidence in a lawsuit brought by a group of citizens against the Kings arena deal, which is still in process.
Most of the material disclosed is from early in 2013, and shows the constant communication between the mayor, his chief of staff Conway, spokesman Sosenko—all using private email accounts—and certain players in the arena deal. These included Kunal Merchant, the mayor’s former chief of staff who went to work for the mayor’s nonprofit arena booster organization, Think Big, then later parlayed that into a job with the Kings. Another frequent correspondent in this batch is Jeffrey Dorso, a Sacramento attorney who helped push through the deal.
Many of the emails are historically interesting, allowing readers a glimpse of how the sausage is made at City Hall. Many of the exchanges show the group developing its talking points and planning how to Sacramento News & Review - Mayor Kevin Johnson and his staff use private email for public work—and there's no rule saying they can't - News - Local Stories - April 23, 2015: