The Tri-Valley Herald in Pleasanton reports that the state’s Third District Court of Appeal is scheduled to hear arguments May 20 regarding whether a Tracy city councilwoman’s e-mails sent from her home computer are public documents. The Tracy Press originally sued the city to obtain e-mails Councilwoman Suzanne Tucker sent from her home computer to officials at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory regarding a proposed bio-agriculture research facility.
Meanwhile a federal judge in a Freedom of Information Act suit to obtain White House e-mails resident on Republican National Committee private servers has concluded that the nature of the server is not necessarily informative as to whether the document contained official or political communications," and a knowledge resources think tank has written to Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to express its
concern about the practices undertaken by U.S. government officials that monitor and implement trade policies in the area of pharmaceutical drugs and intellectual property rights. There is evidence of the practice of using commercial email accounts, such as Yahoo and Hotmail, in order to avoid communications being searchable and subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
That’s great! I know in my town the elected officals are doing the same thing to circumvent the public record laws.