On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times announced that it filed a lawsuit against the city of LA, accusing officials of unlawfully withholding and deleting Mayor Karen Bass’ text messages and other public records that were exchanged during the wildfires in January.
The Times announced this on their website (via LA Times):
The city has already turned over many of the exchanges between Mayor Karen Bass and other officials sought by Times reporters. But officials have argued they are not compelled to do so under state public records laws.
The Times disagreed. Empowering public officials to scrub their records or to decide which are subject to the law sets a dangerous precedent, Thursday’s suit argued.
To recap, Bass was across the ocean in Ghana at the time the wildfires broke out and ravaged the Los Angeles area. She did this despite the fact that there was a warning about wildfires.
Her text messages from this time have since been deleted because she has them on auto-delete after 30 days, the Times noted. However, the city’s administrative code says that texts must be retained for two years.
Political reporter Julia Wick and investigative reporter Matt Hamilton sought the text messages and were initially told that they did not exist. Later, they were told the messages were deleted.
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“It’s bigger than these text messages,” Kelly Aviles, outside counsel for The Times, said. “The city seems to believe they can destroy whatever they want whenever they want, and that they don’t have a duty to the public to retain public records.”
The mayor’s office offered the LA Times a statement.
“The Mayor’s office has responded to hundreds of public records requests since she was elected and we will continue to do so,” said David Michaelson, counsel to the mayor. “The Mayor’s office released responsive texts to a PRA request from the Times last week and the Office will continue to respond to public record requests.”
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