Following the meeting, Becker filed a request under the city\u2019s 030, requesting city employees put\u00a0the item on a future agenda for discussion. But barriers at city hall block public access to\u00a0information and rob them of the ability to have their concerns heard publicly.<\/p>\n
SPONSORED<\/p>\n
Prior to 2023, the city\u2019s 030 policy allowed anyone to file a request and have an item agendized.<\/p>\n However, city employees wanted a more \u201cstreamlined\u201d process. That means if someone,\u00a0including council members, wants something put on the agenda, they have to work with city\u00a0employees \u2014 behind closed doors.<\/p>\n SPONSORED<\/p>\n An Attack on Democracy<\/p>\n Council Member Kevin Park, who sits on the city\u2019s governance and ethics committee, said that\u00a0\u201cstreamlining\u201d has \u201cremoved democracy\u201d from public engagement. He has repeatedly raised\u00a0issues with the process. Park said city employees \u2014 or even the council \u2014 shouldn\u2019t need to\u00a0approve an agenda item.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because public members may want to illuminate something the council or city employees\u00a0are doing wrong. Needing approval from council or city employees all but ensures a public member\u2019s grievance won\u2019t come to light, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cHow much support do you think they would get from the council? How much support from\u00a0staff? I don\u2019t know,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is not the way it should be. If somebody wants to agendize an\u00a0item, it should be agendized.\u201d<\/p>\n The issue with 030s is just one barrier toward public transparency. The Weekly has reported on\u00a0these issues before, and the culture of obfuscation has stood, if not worsened.<\/p>\n Another barrier is that the email labeled \u201cMayor and Council\u201d also goes to city employees, not\u00a0the council. City employees are then supposed to forward emails to the appropriate council\u00a0members. They are supposed to.\u00a0<\/p>\n Park said emails, typically inviting council members to speak at public events, often fail to reach\u00a0him. He said he suspects city employees are vanguarding communications to prevent certain\u00a0council members from attending.\u00a0<\/p>\n Every time he has raised the issue, Park said city employees accuse him of casting aspersions on\u00a0them or strongly discourage him from insisting an item appear on the agenda. The attitude is\u00a0particularly galling, he said, because such a process could easily be automated.<\/p>\n \u201cThere should never be a disconnect in communication \u2026 Why do we leave it in their hands in\u00a0the first place?\u201d Park said. \u201cIf you sharpen the axe before you start cutting, the cutting goes much\u00a0faster \u2026 Every time staff makes an improvement to something, things actually get worse.\u201d<\/p>\n He called the procedures an \u201cattack on democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n Into the Void<\/p>\n The public is also supposed to be able to get information through records requests. But doing so\u00a0is often like pulling teeth. Last summer, The Weekly submitted a records request seeking\u00a0correspondence about the Nuevo Dog Park closing.<\/p>\n The city took more than four months to produce records relating to the closing. Contained in those records were emails from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. A records request to Santa Clara County revealed emails not contained in the city\u2019s initial response. Three days\u00a0after The Weekly published a story on the situation, the city posted the missing emails on its\u00a0public portal.<\/p>\n Another request submitted by a public member sought clarity on a claim Mayor Lisa Gillmor\u00a0made during a council meeting in November last year. During a discussion on the city\u2019s stadium\u00a0neighborhood relations committee, Gillmor said she gets a \u201cton\u201d of complaints from the\u00a0neighborhoods around the stadium, adding that residents contact her \u201cdirectly or on social\u00a0media.\u201d<\/p>\n The request called for the city to produce those correspondences, both from Gillmor and Kathy\u00a0Watanabe, the former council member for the district near the stadium. The city took more than\u00a0two-and-a-half months to publish a response and continued to publish documents through\u00a0February. Contained in those documents were 22 emails over an eight-year span, most of which\u00a0never went to Gillmor.\u00a0<\/p>\n The documents contained no social media messages.<\/p>\n And it isn\u2019t just these two requests. Almost every time The Weekly submits a records request, the\u00a0city kicks the can down the road, extending the simplest request for as long as possible, using a\u00a0slew of exemptions and excuses. In the rare event the city produces documents, they are meager.\u00a0Further, Gillmor and Watanabe are both notorious for failing to produce material for records\u00a0requests.<\/p>\n Suspecting these situations violated the California Public Records Act, The Weekly emailed City\u00a0Attorney Glen Googins. In those emails, The Weekly sought a legal explanation as to why such\u00a0behavior was being allowed. Googins never replied.\u00a0<\/p>\n A Pattern of Denial<\/p>\n A 2019 California Civil Grand Jury report, titled \u201cThe City of Santa Clara: Public Records\u00a0Access \u2013 The Paper Chase,\u201d found the city\u2019s \u201crecordkeeping to be disorganized\u201d and getting\u00a0supposedly publicly available information to be a \u201ctime-consuming and difficult chore.\u201d<\/p>\n When a civil grand jury accused several of her council colleagues of colluding with the San Francisco 49ers in 2022, Gillmor was keen to put the grand jury on a pedestal. Despite her frequent defense\u00a0of that grand jury, in a 176-page response to the 19-page grand jury report from 2019, Gillmor dug in her\u00a0heels. She noted that the council questioned why the grand jury singled out Santa Clara and took\u00a0issue with the \u201clack of benchmarking.\u201d<\/p>\n The report called for the city to provide employees additional training, create a written policy\u00a0and put in place a records management system.\u00a0<\/p>\n In response to the recommendation that the city should \u201conly invoke the 14-day extension where\u00a0permissible,\u201d the city claimed such a policy was already in place. It claimed a written policy was\u00a0underway, that setting up a management system \u201crequired further analysis\u201d and that it will not\u00a0train other city employees on records requests because \u201cit is not warranted or is not reasonable.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem is deeper than just city hall. During his vie for Santa Clara police chief, Cory Morgan vowed to increase transparency. Toward that end, he said he would bring back the department\u2019s police blotter. More than a year into his tenure, he has yet to deliver on that promise.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Not Alone<\/p>\n Jim McManis, a partner of McManis Faulkner, successfully sued San Jose for failing to disclose\u00a0public records<\/a>. He said these types of shenanigans \u201cdon\u2019t surprise\u201d him and are \u201cvery typical\u201d of\u00a0most cities and counties across California.<\/p>\n \u201cIt flies in the face of the California constitution. It flies in the face of many statutes. Most cities\u00a0couldn\u2019t care less,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Cities often respond to reasonable records requests with \u201cmeaningless memos\u201d and throw every\u00a0excuse in the book \u2014 no matter how irrelevant \u2014 at the wall to see what sticks, he said.<\/p>\n David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, said he works hard not to assume\u00a0bad intent. Perhaps city employees are overworked or under-trained, he said. But that itself is a\u00a0red flag, he added.<\/p>\n Further, sometimes requests are too broad or too narrow to produce the desired information, he\u00a0said. The law requires agencies to perform a reasonably adequate search, provided it doesn\u2019t\u00a0impose an \u201cundue burden\u201d on the agency.<\/p>\n \u201cThey don\u2019t have to spend weeks scrambling to track down records,\u201d Loy said. \u201cThey can\u2019t bury\u00a0their heads in the sand either.\u201d<\/p>\n However, \u201cundue burden\u201d is often \u201cway more than agencies think,\u201d Loy said. Unfortunately,\u00a0typically, the only remedy to the recalcitrance is to sue.\u00a0<\/p>\n Convincing agencies to spend money for transparency is a tough sell, Loy said. Because cities\u00a0and counties are \u201cplaying with house money,\u201d they often just bake such lawsuits into the cost of\u00a0doing business, he added.<\/p>\n Both McManis and Loy said the problem isn\u2019t unique to Santa Clara. Loy called it \u201cendemic\u201d\u00a0across the state.<\/p>\n \u201cCalifornia fancies itself as very progressive, but it lags behind other states in the area of\u00a0transparency,\u201d Loy said. \u201cDifferent agencies have different cultures around transparency. With\u00a0some agencies, it is like squeezing blood from a stone.\u201d<\/p>\n So, while city employees and council members proclaim their devotion to transparency, they\u00a0continue to play hide-the-ball with the public. Given the trend, the likelihood the city will get its\u00a0act\u00a0together any time soon isn\u2019t promising.<\/p>\n Contact David Alexander at\u00a0d.todd.alexander@gmail.com<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n SPONSORED<\/p>\n![\"BrainShare](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Version-61.png\"\/)
![\"BrainShare](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Version-61.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/banner-v_21_page-0001.jpg\"\/)
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/banner-v_21_page-0001.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"SiliconValleyVoice_Ad2\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Advertise_SVV_5_1-1.jpg\"\/)
![\"SiliconValleyVoice_Ad2\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Advertise_SVV_5_1-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Corruption. Backstabbing. Political assassination. At a meeting last month, Anthony Becker, Santa Clara\u2019s former vice mayor, lobbed these\u00a0accusations…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227983,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[16829,6036,3548,103652,79747,103653,2917,88,90,89,197,2920,2921,2922],"class_list":["post-227982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-anthony-becker","tag-bay-area-news","tag-city-of-santa-clara","tag-cory-morgan","tag-glen-googins","tag-kathy-watanabe","tag-kevin-park","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-santa-clara","tag-santa-clara-mayor-lisa-gillmor","tag-santa-clara-weekly","tag-silicon-valley-voice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}