Officials’ data on devices ruled public

Emails and text messages by state and local government employees about government business are public records even if they’re sent to or from personal phones, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

“If public officials could evade the law simply by clicking into a different email account, or communicating through a personal device, sensitive information could routinely evade public scrutiny,” Justice Carol Corrigan said in the 7-0 decision.

The ruling overturns a lower-court decision that would have allowed the city of San Jose to withhold messages sent by the mayor and City Council members on their personal electronic devices. The high court said California’s publicrecords law applies to all communications by officials or government workers about public

affairs.

That doesn’t mean all communications from state and local government employees must be disclosed, Corrigan said — for example, a worker’s email to a spouse about an incompetent co-worker would probably remain private, while the same message to a supervisor might involve the public’s business. A city could also redact, or withhold, private language in emails before releasing them, she said, and local governments can adopt procedures for employees to search their own files for relevant information.

The ruling was a victory for news organizations and others seeking broader public access to state and local government records.

The court’s decision “respects the public’s strong right to know what is going on with public business, and it should defeat efforts to evade public scrutiny by conducting public business on so-called ‘private’ electronic devices,” said attorney Karl Olson, who filed arguments on behalf of the California Newspaper Publishers Association and other media groups and publishers, including Hearst Corp., which owns The Chronicle.

The court noted that the 1968 California Public Records Act defines records that are “prepared, owned, used or retained by any state or local agency” as public documents. A state appeals court ruled in 2014 that the law did not cover employees’ personal accounts, but Corrigan said the government is responsible for any records “prepared” by one of its employees as part of official business.

San Jose City Attorney Rick Doyle, whose office argued against release of the messages, said he didn’t think the law was as clear as the ruling portrayed it. But he said he welcomed the court’s guidance for local governments to ask employees to examine their files for public records and to train them in distinguishing public from private communications.

In 2010, a year after the case arose, Doyle said, San Jose began requiring its mayor and 10 City Council members to turn over all records of communications on personal devices about city business. “It’s one thing to do it for 11 people and another thing for 5,000 employees,” he said.

Thursday’s case is City of San Jose vs. Superior Court, S218066.