By Bruce B. Brugmann
The City Attorney and City Hall are lathered and steamed these days because of a barrage of public records requests from Kimo Crossman, a public records activist with few equals.
The principle seems to be: go after Kimo full bore but do not molest PG@E on its low franchise fee in perpetuity, the lowest in the state,or its private power monopoly that is illegal under public power mandates of the federal Raker Act and U.S. Supreme Court. So we offer some suggestions on how to deal with the new “sunshine” crisis.
For starters, Kimo has a good idea: create a publicly accessible database that gets automatic copies of every document created at City Hall (unless there’s a damn good reason to mark it secret). That way the busiest of advocates can spend their time searching the files on their own, and the city’s lawyers can do what they ought to be doing, fighting PG@E. B3