EXCLUSIVE: The Not-so ethical, Ethics Commission CPRA response

My original CPRA request to the City.pdf

Download PDF • 1.68MB

This link will take you to a .pdf document that provides information and analysis regarding one of my recent CPRA request(s), concerning the City’s new 'Bluestone safe' contract. This particular CPRA request was directed to the Ethics Commission of the City of Los Angeles. This document contains my initial email request, as well as the city's response. It also includes a deep dive into one of the more questionable documents that I received. I have provided my own interpretation and analysis of the response. I hope you enjoy.

*** Note: If you do not wish to go through all of the documents, I have provided my analysis and observations (below):

Analysis:

Clearly the City ignored its own established rules and policies regarding financial disclosure statements and their mandatory 10-day reporting period.

Furthermore, the City waited until this high dollar, pay-to-play contract, became known in the public-sphere, to require Mr. Salimpour create and file his financial disclosure documents.

If you review the City’s letter response from Nancy Jackson, the ethics commission’s “strategic communications” director (last paragraph), the City clearly asserts that they are under no obligation to “create a record that does not exist.” In fact, this is normal/ standard CPRA procedure. When someone files a CPRA request, they are expecting to get documents that already exist, and are in an agency’s possession… Not to have documents surreptitiously invented to suggest or portray an alternative narrative.

California Penal Code 134 PC makes it a crime for any person to prepare false evidence with a “deceitful purpose” in a legal proceeding. While there may not be a true illegality to what the ethics commission has done, their actions are anything but forthright. It seems the ethics commission was all too willing to correct a mistake (or purposeful omission), a fact which should have triggered an investigation instead.

The way the City’s ethics commission folded this document neatly into a multipage CPRA response, without acknowledging or calling attention to the creation dates of this document is troubling. I may be naïve, but as a city resident I would expect the ethics commission to be the watchdog for this kind of transgression, not the chief enabler and fixer.

This is just one more reason to demand a full and transparent investigation into the Bluestone contract and its formation. We can already see that the city’s own rules were not followed. What is there to assure us that other rules were not broken as well? Unfortunately, the city’s own ethics department seems more involved in protecting the political class and molding a counter story to an obviously corrupt, and ill-conceived contract.

More is certain to come out, as more information slowly dribbles in…and I will try to keep you posted on those details. 😊