Trust and Accountability

The other day, I sent an email to City Clerk Holly Charléty with a simple question: how much does it cost the city to respond to public records act (PRA) requests? She responded right away that she unfortunately cannot give a quantitative answer to that question, because city staff does not track their time at so granular a level, but she did point out that the city generally responds to some 250-350 records requests every year, and those requests are handled by multiple people across the city. It sounds like probably many hours of work, particularly if requests are broad.

(Toy example: suppose it’s 300 requests and each one takes one hour to fulfill, and we ballpark the total hourly rate of people on staff at $100/hr which is probably conservative, then that’s a cost of $30,000 annually to the city. I’d bet it’s considerably more than that.)

I love that we have mechanisms to access public records. I love that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exists. I wish it didn’t have to—I wish that governments at all levels were so committed to transparency and information accessibility that we didn’t have to rely on citizen watchdogs and whistle blowers… But I’m aware that wishful thinking doesn’t bring about a just world, and sometimes we have to fight tooth and nail against bureaucratic stagnation, corruption, and mismanagement in order to get to justice.

Here in El Cerrito, I hear that sometimes it can take months or even years to get a response on a PRA request, depending on the scope of the request. And there are records that are exempt from public access. I also hear rumors about certain individuals who have submitted tens or perhaps hundreds of PRA requests over the years, and that comes with a real cost in city staff time, which comes straight from taxpayers. I recently started to wonder if the PRA system is a potential source for abuse—both in its capacity to waste staff time, and to manufacture outrage if requests are not handled quickly enough. The system can be a double edged sword. There was a story recently in the Economist about how AI tools are enabling so much public comment that it is breaking (British) state systems’ ability to handle routine business. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same phenomenon is happening here in the USA.

This goes back to something more fundamental I’ve been thinking about in relation to what makes a government work. Trust is the backbone of any high functioning organization. I was talking with current city councilor William Ktsanes the other day about the culture of low trust in our community right now, which has led certain concerned citizens to put forward increasingly urgent demands for transparency, which can actually reduce the quality of responses, which may contribute to the sense that the city is trying to hide something. Once trust breaks down, it’s hard to get it back again. William gave an example from a few years back, when he tried to get access to city finance information in order to understand the city’s financial outlook (this was during the state audit years, when the auditor had flagged El Cerrito as at high risk of bankruptcy). As William tells it, the city refused to release the information on the grounds that, 1) William didn’t have the proprietary software needed to access the files (though William offered to pay for a copy of the software), and 2) they didn’t want to see a scenario where the public could “manipulate” the numbers. William was understandably unconvinced by these arguments, so he made comparable requests to over a hundred other California cities, and all but one (Fremont, if you’re curious) complied in some form or another.*

From what I am beginning to gather, from this story and others, the city really did break trust with the public during the financial meltdown leading up to (and perhaps in its initial response to) the State Auditor’s report. However we got into the messy situation we were in, I can believe that the city leadership’s initial reaction to criticism may have been defensive: that’s a normal human reaction, after all. It’s hard to piece it all together since it’s a lot of hearsay about who-said-what-when, but with many residents raising the alarm I can certainly imagine there were a lot of missed opportunities to engage, listen to feedback, and respond with openness.

The problem is that once trust is lost, it takes a long time and a lot of painful, deliberate work to rebuild it. William himself provides a really interesting example of how thorny that rebuilding process can be. He came onto the city council with hopes of being a voice for certain “concerned citizens,” but has found it hard to work with the other members of the council and the city. It looks to me as though there was enough bad feeling built up from William’s prior activities and associations** that his fellow councilors perceived him as an opponent. That dynamic hasn’t really improved in the two years he’s spent on council. I talked to him about this situation extensively. Part of the issue, he pointed out, is the structures of our government itself. The Brown Act, which sets a lot of rules for transparency and public access to government meetings and decision-making, also interferes with city councilors’ ability to build human relationships and talk about the issues in lower-stakes environments or even outside the spotlight. It also dictates how councilors are allowed to respond to public comments.

If you’re not familiar with the Brown Act, it’s a California law governing transparency in public meetings and guaranteeing the right of the public to participate. I found this pamphlet (PDF) is a good resource for digging into what it specifically allows and disallows council members to do.

“…the Act specifically prohibits any use of direct communication, personal intermediaries or technological devices that is employed by a majority of the members of the legislative body to develop a collective concurrence as to action to be taken. (§ 54952.2(b).) Most often this type of meeting is conducted through a series of communications by individual members or less-than-a-quorum groups, ultimately involving a majority of the body’s members. These meetings are called serial meetings.” – page 11, The Brown Act: Open Meetings for Local Legislative Bodies

It’s dry stuff, but the gist is that the well-meaning rules we have in place to stop collusion and corrupt governments from keeping their dealings secret can have some unfortunate consequences, similar to the potential externalities I mentioned earlier affecting records requests. Governing is done by humans, with human trust and relationships baked right into the core of every activity, so if our leaders are constrained from actually building relationships, their quality of work suffers. When leaders are constrained from responding to public comments directly, the public perception naturally starts to be that they aren’t listening, even though the rule about not responding exists to ensure commenters don’t feel intimidated by that response.

Now, these rules are not completely rigid. Councilors aren’t supposed to respond directly to non-agendized comments, but they can request topics be addressed by staff, for instance by adding an item to a future agenda. Councilors are permitted meet one-on-one and discuss issues so long as they are not using serial meetings to build a voting consensus with a majority. If the goal of meeting one-on-one is simply to build rapport and mutual understanding, I see no reason councilors should not be regularly meeting offline as a way to nurture productive working relationships. Yes, they should make sure to consult with the city attorney to ensure they are abiding by both letter and spirit of the law, but the law doesn’t exist to muck up trust and put obstacles in the way of effective governance.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear that a lot of what William had to say about our current city management was actually quite positive. It sounded like he believes we have a generally high functioning city manager and staff, and he acknowledges the overall arc of city finances has significantly improved over the years. He still has plenty of concerns—he would like to have more direct access to the city’s raw financial data, since he feels he has the expertise to be able to interpret it and suggest improvements—and he perceives a lot of the structural barriers that prevent councilors from peering into day-to-day city operations as being—you guessed it—double-edged: both enabling our team of experts to do their job without micromanagement, but also making it hard to know if the council is weighing in on the right things and at the right level of detail. Unlike some of the loudest city-critical voices I’m seeing elsewhere, he seems to really want to have nuanced conversations about what’s working well and what can be improved. His viewpoint is a lot more interesting to me than that of folks who just want to blame the city for not being transparent enough. I don’t agree with all of his positions, nor do I think his performance as a leader is without flaws, but I do think he’s got some valid points about things that aren’t working optimally.

I’ll end with a note on public access. Giving public comment at city hall is a great way to throw your feelings into the void. Enough people repeating the same messages can be an effective way to shift the dialog in city hall—see, for example, the recent anti-Flock citizen campaign—but it can also just be a space to complain, complain, complain, without having an impact. Some of my neighbors have expressed frustration that our city councilors are not participating in their preferred social media platforms, and are therefore inaccessible to the public. My experience has been different: just in the past two months, I have emailed and met/met with four out of five councilors in person, and they have all been enthusiastic about speaking to members of the public, in some cases making a great deal of time available for me to ask questions, address concerns, and even make my case for what I think they should be doing with their leadership positions. I feel so privileged to live in a small enough town that I can do that, and I’m grateful to these folks who have given me so much of their time and attention. The experience has made me believe that we have councilors who really care, and are truly invested in making our city better, listening to residents, and holding themselves accountable.

*He asked me to directly note that his opinions of city finance have changed in the years since he made this request: “There’s been significant improvement in financial transparency since 2021 and [he considers] the Finance Department to be in excellent hands now with Crystal Reams (Finance Director/Treasurer) and Claire Coleman (Budget/Financial Services Manager).”

**In addition to contributing two guest posts (1, 2), in the early days of the ECCRG blog, after Cathy left El Cerrito, William made a one-time donation to pay for the domain name for a limited period of time. He states he never assumed ownership or control over the site, and in the spirit of restoring trust, I’m willing to believe him.

Note: An hour before publication I sent a near final draft of this post to William to give him an opportunity to check it for accurate representation of our conversation. I haven’t yet come up with a standardized process for inviting comment during the drafting process (see: I’m not a journalist, and this is an opinion project) so I ended up posting before he got back to me. The piece above has been lightly edited based on his requests/clarifications, particularly in the footnotes.