Unacceptable delay
None of the bills is attorney-client privilege.
Posted: Monday, November 23, 2009
Editorial, Mountain Democrat
The Cameron Park Community Services District Board of Directors last Wednesday agreed to let the public see its legal bills after the lawyer who sent in the largely unitemized bills looks them over. So sometime in mid-December the public and the press can see the bills. This is an unacceptable delay. And this gives the attorney who denied the public access to the bills the discretion to determine what is public and what is so-called attorney-client privilege.
None of the bills is attorney-client privilege. They are all financial records that are public records and subject to the California Public Records Act.
“The Public Records Act provides that ‘Public records are open to inspection at all time during the office hours of the ... local agency and every person has a right to inspect any public record...’ ” the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association reminded the CSD in a letter to the board Nov. 3.
Stop the charade with the lawyer reviewing and “redacting’’ bills he has already sent and the district has already paid.
The quest to get this basic public information, for us began in July and required prodding a recalcitrant staff to give us basic budget and spending information after the end of the fiscal year. The information our reporter was given was for only 11 months of the 2008-09 fiscal year and Nov. 13 our reporter was told the staff was too busy to give us the final month’s total for legal bills. Of course, the district’s counsel has continued to erroneously claim all bills are subject to attorney-client privilege,
The public also began requesting seeing the legal bills in July and a list of legal expenses. This resident of Cameron Park sought a “list of legal expenses, by attorney, including ... the amount of the fee.”
The district’s lawyer, according to the Howard Jarvis letter, denied the request “because a ‘list’ per se, does not exist and ‘creation of documents that do not currently exist, to respond to a request, is not required by law.’” And he threw in the usual red herring of attorney-client privilege.
From this answer it sounds like the district hired Franz Kafka as an attorney.
“Billing invoices do not constitute advice given by the lawyer. Rather, agency expenditures are quintessential public records and no vendor billing a public agency has a reasonable expectation that payments made to him from the public treasury will be kept confidential. The happenstance that the vendor is an attorney cannot serve as a pretext for secrecy,” the Howard Jarvis attorney wrote.
The legal bills to the district are now district property and no longer belong to the lawyer the district uses. Stop the charade with the lawyer reviewing and “redacting’’ bills he has already sent and the district has already paid. Show us the bills. What are you hiding?
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