(Click on Image to Enlarge)
Okay, before anyone starts with their judgments, let's all take a minute and look at the image above. It's a city of Claremont pay stub with all individual information redacted. Now does anyone see a blank field for Social Security information? Date of birth? Home address? Home telephone? No. Nothing. Nada.
And, don't forget, this and 282 others were posted in a downloadable .pdf file on the city of Claremont's on-line document archive for anyone in the world to access. And there were dozens of these .pdfs on the city's website - one for every two week pay period going back at least a couple years. A search of the public archive for the terms "Jeffrey Parker performance" turned up the pay stubs.
The city has continued its claims that the information was somehow leaked to us or that we stole the material. Claremont's claims are false, and we believe they know the claims are baseless. After it's initial reaction on Friday, 9/7, city officials backed off referring the matter to the Claremont Police Department. Their press release issued on Monday, 9/10, made no mention of this blog and only spoke vaguely of "recent events" showing a "breach of confidentiality."
And Google, which pulled the initial posting that included two pay stub images, reversed course on why it censored our blog, first saying that the images contained confidential information, then claiming that the post was removed because the images were copyrighted.
Neither the city nor Google have responded to our requests that they provide us with the specifics of the city's complaint. We've received no email from the city or their attorney, Sonia Carvalho, telling us what information is confidential or seeking to work with us to verify the source of the information.
Instead, the city has had its IT people checking. Of course, we have to wonder, are these the same IT people responsible for posting the information in the first place? If so, you will likely never know the truth. Remember the movie "Breach?"
We believe that the city, when it pulled the plug on its on-line archive after we accessed the pay stub document, made some change in its system that prevents the search from pulling up the pay documents. How hard is it to identify all the changes that have been made in their system since the last week in August, when we pulled the material and then undo them long enough to conduct a test?
And the search takes a while. It's searching through decades of scanned documents. Are the city's IT geniuses even bothering let the search run?
Carvalho And The Ol' Misdirection
One thing is obvious to even the most casual observer: the city attorney is providing some highly questionable advice to her client. Carvalho's shifting rationales for withholding the original complaint to Google don't bear up to scrutiny. First, she claims a non-existent attorney-client privilege. But the complaint was between Carvalho and Google, a third-party, not her client, the city of Claremont.
Then, she apparently claimed the material was copyrighted. But government forms apparently aren't copyrightable.
Lastly, she seems to be setting up a claim that her complaint is attorney work product.
All of this lawyerly footwork has prompted some comments on the Internet. The Slashdot website carried this comment from an attorney yesterday under a discussion thread titled, "Wow, that is one clueless lawyer":
...more ridiculous is the City attorney's refusal to release her communications with Google, citing "attorney-client privilege." Any communication shared with a third party (i.e., someone other than the lawyer or client) is automatically not privileged. She starts to set up a claim for attorney work product by explaining how Google might become adverse, but again, a communication with a third party -- particularly the adverse party -- cannot be covered by the AWP doctrine.
I thought it was hard to pass the California bar, how did these idiots ever do it?
A Familiar Pattern
The Slashdot community seems to hit it right on the head with a few comments about the city not wanting to release their Google complaint because it would show that the city was making things up as they were going along. They overreacted and made some unfounded claims to Google. Combine that with the intense need to hide the true amount of compensation city employees receive, and you get Carvalho's responses and non-responses.
To those of you who haven't heard of Claremont before this, it's nothing new. Carvalho has made a career out of finding ways of withholding public documents through claims of confidentiality, work product, and attorney-client privilege. She has said more than once that she represents not the people of Claremont, but the city council majority. Her philosophy has been to force people and news organizations to sue the city in order to use the bottomless pit of city funds to outspend them in litigation.
We've seen this time and again in Claremont's past, and Claremont's been recognized for its traditional policy of governmental secrecy. Claremont's reformed its ways in the past couple years, but crises bring out the worst in this town (see the Irvin Landrum shooting or the $17.5 million Palmer Canyon fire settlement).
What the salary and especially employee bonus information shows, what Claremont seeks to hide, is the fact that in the past and present incompetence have been amply rewarded. No wonder they want to hide that from you.
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