Mayor Kevin Johnson deleted text messages about arena deal
Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson deleted text messages, including some related to the city’s arena deal, after city officials received a legal letter advising them that they were required to preserve all electronic communications related to the deal.
Johnson, testifying in court on day six of a lawsuit that seeks to invalidate the city’s agreement to subsidize an arena, told the court he sent texts infrequently at the time and that very few of those he deleted involved arena discussions.
“I did it without thinking,” Johnson said on the witness stand in Sacramento Superior Court on Tuesday afternoon. “There was no ill intent.”
He described what he erased as “chit chat, but nothing relevant” to the court case challenging the deal the mayor and the city struck in 2014 to partner on building a new arena.
Judge Tim Frawley asked the mayor a series of pointed questions, however, and indicated he would consider Johnson’s actions when ruling on whether the city engaged in secret elements of the arena deal.
The plaintiffs, three city residents, allege the city put several goodies into the half-billion-dollar arena deal in order to secretly compensate an investor group for overpaying for the team in 2013 to keep it from moving to Seattle.
Frawley noted that the plaintiffs have asked him to impose sanctions on the city for failing to adhere to their attorneys’ legal request in June 2013 for preservation of communications relevant to the arena deal, including emails and texts.
The judge said the law allows him, when deciding the case, “to draw a negative inference from the destruction of that evidence.”
“I’m trying to get a handle on what would be an appropriate sanction, if any,” Frawley said Tuesday as he questioned the mayor.
Johnson did not estimate how many texts he erased but said that he may have texted 10 to 15 times a day and that it was his normal habit to erase texts. Johnson said he did not recall how many texts he erased from players in the arena deal but conceded at least a few were arena-related.
Frawley told the attorneys for the city and the plaintiffs that he will give the text issue the weight he feels it deserves, at trial’s end, in issuing his ruling on the case.
The trial is expected to last at least to the end of the week.
The plaintiffs sued in 2013 after the city and Kings agreed to a nonbinding term sheet. They are seeking to invalidate the deal that the team and the city reached last year. If that were to happen, it is unclear what effect it would have on arena construction, which is well underway and scheduled for completion in October 2016.
Johnson spent more than three hours on the stand Tuesday. During his testimony, he said the prospective Kings owners initially asked the city two years ago if it could chip in more to the deal, but he said no.
“I shot it down,” Johnson. “It was ridiculous from the onset. They were just negotiating. We said absolutely not and moved on.”
Plaintiffs’ attorney Jeffrey Anderson, who has said he believes the city did put sweeteners in the deal, showed Johnson and the court numerous memos and emails, obtained from theMayor Kevin Johnson deleted text messages about arena deal | The Sacramento Bee:
