Addiction, City Council, Courts, Police, public disclosure

This Week on PubliCola: May 10, 2025

Ethics rules, a public records lawsuit, and a bar complaint against Seattle’s Republican city attorney.

Monday, May 5

Seattle Nice: New Hope for Fentanyl Users

On this week’s episode, Sandeep and I interviewed the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s medical experts about a breakthrough in treatment for opioid addiction that makes it easier for people who use fentanyl to start medication-assisted treatment, and more likely that they’ll stick with treatment once they start.

Minimum Wage Advocates Countersue Burien; Council Bill Says Conflict of Interest Recusals Are Bad for Democracy

In response to a lawsuit by the city of Burien claiming that the minimum wage ordinance recently passed by voters is confusing and unenforceable, proponents of the law countersued, alleging that Burien is ignoring the will of the voters. And, the Seattle City Council argues that recusing themselves from votes when they have financial conflicts of interest would deprive voters of representation.

Tuesday, May 6

Seattle Police Guild Sues Police Department Over Public Records Delays

We aren’t the only ones fed up with SPD’s delay tactic of “grouping” public disclosure requests filed by the same person and considering them one at a time; the Seattle Police Officers Guild also says SPD is using the policy to withhold records from requests dating back as far as 2020.

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Wednesday, May 7

The Most Common Reason for Past City Council Recusals: Owning Rental Property

As the council prepares to release themselves from longstanding ethics rules just in time for a vote on changes to landlord-tenant law (some council members are landlords and might have to abstain under the current code), we looked back at the relatively few times council members have recused themselves in the past. The most common financial conflict was—drumroll—being a landlord.

Thursday, May 8

County Council Gives Itself a Little ($315,000) Gift; Saka’s Effort to Divert Traffic Safety Funds to Sidewalks Fails

The King County Council added more than $300,000 to their district budgets to pay for unanticipated expenses at a time when the county faces a $160 million two-year shortfall. And Seattle Councilmember Rob Saka narrowly failed to convince his colleagues to use speed camera revenues on sidewalks rather than traffic safety projects.

At Ethics Meeting, Moore Says Changing Ethics Code Will Improve Representation and “Transparency”

At a meeting of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, Councilmember Cathy Moore responded to a dozen public comments opposing her proposal to weaken ethics rules, reiterating the claim that recusal was antidemocratic and adding that verbally disclosing a conflict of interest is more transparent than recusing oneself from a vote because of that conflict.

Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi Files Bar Complaint Against City Attorney Ann Davison and Her Former Criminal Chief

PubliCola exclusive: Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi, who’s been effectively prohibited from doing her job for the last year, filed a bar complaint against the city attorney and her former criminal division chief, charging that they fabricated and misrepresented evidence against her in their letter issuing a blanked affidavit of prejudice against her, preventing Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases.

Courts

Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi Files Bar Complaint Against City Attorney Ann Davison and Her Former Criminal Chief


Vaddadi says City Attorney Ann Davison’s office made “counterfactual, false, and defamatory” statements to justify a decision to prohibit the judge from hearing misdemeanor cases last year.

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi has filed a formal complaint with the Washington State Bar Association against City Attorney Ann Davison and her former criminal division chief, Natalie Walton-Anderson, over their decision last year to preemptively disqualify her from hearing any criminal cases by filing a Affidavit of Prejudice in every case that lands in Vaddadi’s courtroom, disqualifying Vaddadi from hearing these cases.

The bar association has the authority to take disciplinary action against any state-licensed attorney, up to and including disbarment.

By prohibiting Vaddadi from hearing misdemeanor cases, Davison effectively overturned the 2023 election in which voters elected her to the bench. Davison announced her decision in a memo and press release last year.

Davison’s decision prompted the Seattle Times to publish a contemptuous editorial excoriating the “uninformed voters” who elected Vaddadi and calling her a biased ideologue—a term they never used to describe conservative firebrand Judge Ed McKenna, whom the editorial board described as a victim when progressive city attorney Pete Holmes called him out for blatantly political rulings and public statements.

For more than a year, Vaddadi’s job has consisted primarily of reviewing traffic tickets. That changed somewhat in February, when the City Attorney’s Office stopped disqualifying her automatically from cases that don’t involve allegations of domestic violence or DUIs. When these cases come up, a pro tem judge or magistrate usually has to sit in, at the city’s expense. “It’s almost like paying an eighth judge to preside in criminal court,” Vaddadi said.

Davison and Walton-Anderson—who is now Mayor Bruce Harrell’s chief public safety advisor—claimed last year that Vaddadi was biased and incompetent, vaguely citing several cases in which, they alleged, Vaddadi had improperly released a defendant, failed to find probable cause when probable cause existed, and showed what they described as “a complete lack of understanding, or perhaps even intentional disregard, of the evidence rules, even on basic issues.”

Vaddadi’s complaint eviscerates those claims, calling them “counterfactual, false, and defamatory.”

“The statements were untethered to a specific proceeding and published in part to provide political cover for a far-reaching blanket [Affidavit of Prejudice] policy of unprecedented scope,” Vaddadi wrote. “The effect of the policy was to exclude me from hearing all misdemeanor cases for most of 2024, which strained court resources and resulted in litigation against the City of Seattle.”

The Washington Community Alliance and three Seattle voters sued the city for disenfranchising voters by disqualifying Vaddadi last year. 

“It was a tough year,” Vaddadi told PubliCola on Thursday. “There’s this scathing piece of writing that’s published [and repeated] in the media, to my colleagues and the people I respect, and I know it’s full of lies. And what is awful is, because she’s the city attorney, and Natalie Walton-Anderson is now head of public safety at the mayor’s office, they have a powerful voice. And they’ve used it to spread these lies about me, and people believe them—and that’s really hard.”

Vaddadi said that, contrary to what Davison and Walton-Anderson claimed in their memo, no one from the city attorney’s office ever reached out to her to discuss their concerns, or took any of the other other avenues that were available to them before announcing she would be disqualified from all misdemeanor cases.

Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid, speaking on his own behalf and not as a representative of the court, said the decision to completely exclude Vaddadi from hearing misdemeanor cases appears to be unprecedented. “In the history of the state of Washington, no prosecuting attorney has ever used the affidavit of prejudice to this decree—not even close,” Shadid said. “This blows every other blanket AOP situation out of the water. And it’s worse, because they never came to Judge Vaddadi with their concerns.”

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“This feels to me like they are exploiting a loophole in the democratic process and the legal process in general,” Vaddadi said. “There are avenues to complain about judicial conduct,” such as the Commission on Judicial Conduct and the court process itself. But “they’ve only appealed one case that I’ve ruled on”—a case in which Vaddadi disqualified an assistant city attorney, Victoria Pugh, from prosecuting a case in which she was also a witness. (The city attorney’s office appealed that decision and a Superior Court judge sided with Vaddadi.)

It was that case, Vaddadi believes, that made Davison and Walton-Anderson come gunning for her. “Such retaliation is improper use of the City Attorney’s authority and was calculated to damage my reputation and to chill judicial independence and integrity,” she wrote in her complaint.

A spokesman for Davison’s office said they had not yet seen Vaddadi’s complaint and therefore could not respond to it before publication.

A key claim in Vaddadi’s complaint is that Davison and Walton-Anderson fabricated or misrepresented cases Vaddadi heard in order to make her sound incompetent, then refused to provide case numbers in response to requests, including media requests. (The city attorney’s office did not provide these case numbers when PubliCola asked for them last year).

This made it hard for her to prove she did not do the things the city attorney’s office accused her of doing, Vaddadi said, such as as improperly dismissing a DUI case, allowing someone who had committed domestic violence to go free, and dismissing a case against someone who failed to comply with treatment—claims Vaddadi says are inaccurate or misleading.

Shadid confirmed that the city attorney’s office “refused to produce the case numbers to me” when he asked on three separate occasions.

Vaddadi disputes the city attorney’s characterization of several cases Davison and Walton-Anderson described in their memo, something she said she was unable to do until members of the public managed to figure out which cases Davison was describing and show that the facts didn’t match the city attorney’s descriptions.

“I knew from the moment they filed [the blanket affidavit of prejudice] that everything in that statement was false, but at this point, I’ve got the cases that they described, with the actual case numbers, and nothing really matches up,” Vaddadi said.

“By comparing the actual records to the summaries in the Memo, it is a trivial exercise to demonstrate that the Memo’s description of my record contains factual statements that Ms. Walton-Anderson and Ms. Davison knew were false at the time the Memo was published,” her compalint says.

Vaddadi said “the most egregious fabrication” of several “directly falsifiable” cases was a case in which, according to the city attorney’s memo, she dismissed a domestic violence case “even though it was clear that the defendant never got on the transport van to [American Behavioral Health Services] to fulfill his residential treatment requirement that was part of dispositional continuance.”

According to Vaddadi’s complaint, almost everything about this description was false or misleading, including the gender of the defendant (she’s a woman), the reason she “never got on the transport van” (she was in a wheelchair and the van driver “refused” to take her), and the disposition of the case (it was continued, not dismissed, and Judge Faye Chess later dismissed it.)

In a letter responding to a bar complaint by Seattle resident Bennett Haselton, an outside attorney for Walton-Anderson said the original order didn’t rest on any specific cases, but acknowledged that the city attorney’s office had some of their facts wrong in the van case. Shadid said the city attorney’s office should have corrected their original memo and redacted their claim that Vaddadi mishandled this case, but they have not done so.

Reiterating the arguments she made in a statement published by the Stranger last year, Vaddadi wrote that contrary to what Davison and Walton-Anderson claimed in their memo, they never met with her to discuss any concerns about her rulings or purported bias toward defendants.

Vaddadi said Davison and Walton-Anderson’s statements closely resemble the “actual malice” standard required to prove libel against a public official—a high bar that requires proof that someone made a false statement, knowing it was false or with “reckless disregard” for the truth, in a way that harmed the person the statement was about.

According to Vaddadi, the city attorney’s statements didn’t just damage her reputation, making it harder for her to be reelected or get other jobs in the future; they also made her the target for “a barrage of vile, racist, and threatening communications directed personally to me,” forcing her to take steps to protect herself and her family from threats.

Presiding Municipal Court Judge Anita Crawford-Willis declined to comment on Vaddadi’s bar complaint. “Judge Vaddadi is a duly elected judge and valued member of the Seattle Municipal Court bench,” she said.

Shadid, who has picked up some of Vaddadi’s cases and administrative work, said that seeing “a promising young judge, a woman of color, being attacked in this way has really affected other women of color and other people in our court.”

Vaddadi said she wants more than just the ability to preside over cases as an elected judge; she wants to fix the damage to her reputation Davison’s office has caused over the past year.

“I’m looking for the truth to come out and for my reputation to be restored … and I’m looking to do my job that I was elected to do,” Vaddadi  said. “I have never filed a bar complaint in my life, and I would hope that I don’t ever have to do it again … but at some point, bad conduct needs to be addressed.”

 

City Council

At Ethics Meeting, Moore Says Changing Ethics Code Will Improve Representation and “Transparency”
Kate Rubin from Be:Seattle testifies before the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission.

By Erica C. Barnett

In advance of today’s meeting to discuss legislation to weaken conflict-of-interest rules for the City Council, the Seattle Ethics Elections Commission met Wednesday afternoon to discuss the implications the changes will have, if they pass.

The proposal, by Councilmember Cathy Moore, would eliminate a requirement in the city’s ethics code that council members recuse themselves from voting on matters in which they have a personal financial interest. Instead, council members—alone among all city officials—could simply disclose that they have a financial conflict before voting.

The change, if it passes, will go into effect just as the council is getting ready to vote on another piece of legislation from Moore that would roll back or alter tenant protections passed by the previous city council, including moratoria on winter and school-year evictions, a maximum $10 fee for late rent, and changes to the so-called “roommate law,” which allows tenants to take on new roommates as long as they go through a screening process after moving in (the law also allows any immediate family member, including people a tenant is dating or has dated in the past, to move in without any screening.)

The vote is likely to be contentious. Two councilmembers, Mark Solomon and Maritza Rivera, own rental propery and could be disqualified from voting under the current rules.

A dozen public commenters, including many who crowded into the small Seattle Municipal Tower conference room where the commission meets, spoke out against the proposal. Several mentioned that this was the first time they had ever offered public comment on any subject.

“For the past 45 years, elected officials in Seattle have been required to recuse themselves from votes involving financial conflicts of interest,” Kate Rubin, the co-director of Be:Seattle, said. “Voters elected this council with the understanding that those rules would still apply. Changing them mid term is a clear violation of the public’s trust. Disclosure is not accountability.”

Commissioner Zach Pekelis said he was concerned that the latest draft of Moore’s legislation differs from the one the commission considered back in March, a modified recusal bill that said that a financial conflict was not a conflict “if the prohibited financial interest is no greater or less than that of other members of the same profession, occupation, class, or group affected by the legislative matter.” That legislation also effectively replaced the recusal requirement with simple disclosure.

Moore, who attended the meeting virtually, said the reason she proposed eliminating the recusal requirement was “so that people who were elected to represent particular voices that are sometimes a minority in the city are not disenfranchised” by having to abstain from issues where they have a financial conflict of interest. (This caused many of the public commenters in the room to scoff loudly).

“I just want to be clear,” Moore continued, “that I, too, share the concerns that [elected officials] should not be there for personal gain, but we also have to balance that with making sure that all voices are heard and people are not disenfranchised.”

Moore struggled, she said, to address this “disenfranchisement” issue in her legislation, and ultimately decided to go with a “full disclosure” model (which she argued could increase “the amount of sunshine and transparency”) instead of requiring council members to abstain when legislation would help or harm them financially. Moore added that if the legislation passes, the council will count on the public to keep them honest.

“As seen here today, we have very proactive, active voices in the city who have no compunction, nor should they, about holding their elected officials accountable.”

The council’s governance committee will take up Moore’s proposal at 2:00 Thursday afternoon. On Wednesday afternoon, Councilmember Dan Strauss issued a statement in his newsletter opposing the changes. “We are just over 100 days into the Trump administration,” Strauss wrote. “We are seeing in real time what happens when our elected officials are not held to the highest ethical standard. As people in power continue to cross ethical red line after red line, now is not the time for the Seattle City Council to roll back its ethics laws.”

Responding to similar complaints at Wednesday’s meeting, Moore said, “Yeah, we have to be aware of what’s happening at a federal level. But in some ways, the greatest way to continue to have trust in local government is for local government to be effective, for local government to be able to actually solve problems.”

City Council, Elections, King County, Transportation

County Council Gives Itself a Little ($315,000) Gift; Saka’s Effort to Divert Traffic Safety Funds to Sidewalks Fails

1. CORRECTION: The original version of this story suggested that Councilmember Girmay Zahilay, who did not respond to our initial request for comment for this story, had used his additional funds to pay for a mailer to his constituents. This was inaccurate—Zahilay did not use the funds for the mailer. We regret the error. 

All nine King County Councilmembers got an unexpected gift last month: a $35,000 add to each of their district budgets, to be spent any way they want.

The one-time funds, allocated by verbal agreement in an obscure (and non-televised) meeting chaired by County Council Chair Girmay Zahilay, was originally going to be a loan to each office, payable next year, but the four members of the committee agreed that requiring repayment in a tight budget year might put councilmembers in a tight position next year. (The county is facing a $160 million two-year budget deficit).

Instead, the committee opted to use “underspend” from last year’s central administrative budget, which totaled about $1 million, to pay for the one-time $315,000 add. Underspent funds become available in the next budget year.

Balducci opted out of the money, saying her office did not have a deficit.

In an email to Zahilay late last month, Balducci wrote, “I want to go on record as saying I don’t think we should do this. I believe it is bad practice and possibly borderline unethical…. It is a bad look for the council to lard up our own budgets this way, especially as I am hearing this additional funding is possibly being used for public communications from offices whose members are up for election.”

2. City Councilmember (and transportation committee chair) Rob Saka tried unsuccessfully to redirect future revenues from new speeding cameras toward new sidewalks, rather than the Automated Traffic Camera Fund, which is slated to receive 20 percent of the revenues from five new 24/7 speed enforcement cameras across the city. (The rest will go into the city’s general fund). Saka’s proposal would have reduced funding for traffic safety programs by 25 percent.

The state legislature adopted new regulations on automated traffic cameras last year, including a change to allow civilian police department employees, rather than just sworn officers, to review traffic camera tickets.

During public comment, several traffic safety advocates asked the council not to divert funding for sidewalks. “The reality is that pedestrians in Seattle, by and large, are not dying because of a lack of sidewalks,” pedestrian and bike advocate Ethan Campbell said. “They’re getting injured and killed while trying to cross roadways designed for high speeds,” like an 83-year-old woman who was struck and killed by a driver who fled the scene in SoDo earlier this week.

The money in the traffic safety fund would pay for safety projects, including improvements that “support equitable access and mobility for persons with disabilities; transportation projects designed to reduce vehicle speeds; and pedestrian, bicyclist, and driver education campaigns.” Saka’s amendment would have also routed 15 percent of revenues from red-light cameras to sidewalks by reducing the amount that goes to traffic safety projects by 25 percent (from 20 to 15 percent) and cutting the amount of red light camera revenues that go into the general fund.

Saka had more success with an amendment asking the Seattle Department of Transportation to “review and evaluate” a specific list of 10 locations as possible sites for the five new speeding cameras. The list is a familiar one: It consists of places where people tend to race their cars late at night. In the past, Saka told SDOT representatives that there was no need for them to come up with their own list of locations for speed cameras, because the council had already did their work for them by making the list of racing sites.

In reality, the 2024 state law requires cities to do an equity analysis before siting traffic cameras; that analysis has to “show a demonstrated need for traffic cameras based on rates of collision, reports of near collisions, travel by vulnerable roadway users, evidence of vehicles speeding, and anticipated or actual ineffectiveness or infeasibility of other mitigation measures.”

Most of the locations on Saka’s list, notably, are not on the city’s own Vision Zero High-Injury Network.

City Council, Renters

The Most Common Reason for Past City Council Recusals: Owning Rental Property

By Erica C. Barnett

As the city council considers eliminating the requirement that council members recuse themselves from matters in which they have a financial interest—a change that would, at the very least, eliminate pressure for landlords Maritza Rivera and Mark Solomon to sit out an upcoming vote to roll back laws that help tenants avoid eviction—we took a look back at the other times city council members have recused themselves in the past.

Currently, the city’s ethics code requires all city employees, including city council members, to recuse themselves from taking action on anything that would present a financial conflict. (The code also requires employees to disclose other potential conflicts to the head of the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission).

As we’ve reported, it has been extremely rare for city council members to recuse themselves because of financial conflicts in the past; looking through a list of past “disqualifications” maintained by the City clerk, we found nine potential examples of such recusals between 2001 and 2025. (The numbers are not exact because, in some cases, the disclosure form explaining the reasons for the recusal was not available online).

In addition to those recusals, there were dozens of examples in which council members sat out votes because they had a direct interest (such as when a council member was getting an appointment and didn’t want to vote for himself or herself) or when the interest was direct but not financial, such as several instances in which then-councilmember Bruce Harrell sat out votes that would benefit the University of Washington because his wife Joanne was on the school’s Board of Trustees.

What’s interesting about the council’s past financial conflicts—and is directly relevant to the timing of the proposal to loosen the city’s ethical standards for council members—is that most of them involved legislation that would benefit or harm council members directly because of property they owned, including rental properties.

If the ethics changes, sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore, pass quickly, Solomon and Rivera will be under no official obligation to abstain on legislation Moore plans to introduce in the next few weeks that would alter the city’s landlord-tenant rules.

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According to multiple sources familiar with internal deliberations on the plan, Moore’s bill would eliminate the winter and school-year eviction moratoria, raise the minimum fee for late rent from $10 to $50, and repeal a law requiring landlords to allow renters to add new roommates to their lease without asking permission first.

Landlords and property owners on the city council haven’t always recused themselves from voting for (or against) their own interests. But they also have done so, with some regularity. In 2013 and 2018, for example, then-councilmember Sally Bagshaw sat out votes establishing new taxes for property owners near the waterfront and downtown, respectively, citing the fact that she lives in the area and would have to pay both taxes (which were approved).

Harrell and former councilmember Mike O’Brien recused themselves from multiple votes on the Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance (RRIO), which requires landlords to register their rentals with the city and allow regular inspections, because they were both landlords at the time (according to campaign finance reports, Harrell no longer owns any rental property.)

Jan Drago, who lived in Pioneer Square, also recused herself from legislation that allowed more density in her neighborhood. (This was in the era before district elections, which pretty much sent that sort of recusal out the window.)

And Jean Godden and Tom Rasmussen recused themselves from voting on a deal with Triad Development that was supposed to build a 650,000-square-foot office and residential tower in the hole in the ground across from City Hall (stop by that block sometime if you want to know how that project went), although public records and media coverage from the time don’t indicate why (and I don’t remember.)

And, of course, Tanya Woo (very reluctantly) recused herself from a vote on legislation that would have lowered the minimum wage for “gig” delivery workers, because she and her husband own a restaurant. Woo’s family also owns an apartment building that provides affordable housing under a tax-credit program.

In those cases, council members’ recusals didn’t affect the vote. But they could in the case of Moore’s rental housing legislation, which faces stiff opposition from tenant advocates (add tenants themselves). If the new law was in place now, Rivera and Solomon (who own a single rental apartment each and earn between $0 and $29,999 a year from rental income, according to their campaign finance reports), would only have to disclose their conflicts, rather than determining with Ethics and Elections whether they’re conflicted out. Without their votes, the legislation would face a tougher path to passage.

The city also keeps records of city officials’ conflict-of-inflict disclosures, which include everything from personal or family relationships (as when Harrell appointed his niece, Monisha Harrell, as senior deputy mayor) to business ownership (Council President Sara Nelson disclosed her ownership stake in Fremont Brewing, but did not recuse herself, during a vote on the city’s maritime-industrial land use policy.)

Most of these documents are straightforward descriptions of a potential appearance of conflict. One, though, is the exact opposite: A defensive letter from Rob Saka, who added $1.5 million to last year’s budget to turf the field where his kids play, and Saka coaches, Little League.

Saka began his “disclosure” by noting that he was only making it because he recently “became aware of certain criticism from a member of the public that there was an alleged appearance of a conflict of interest” in his budget add.

Saka goes on to cite “numerous calls for more turf playfields from members of the public” and an “extensive consultation process” that just happened to conclude that the field where Saka coaches his kids was the best candidate for a new turf field. Also last year, Saka set aside $2 million to remove a road divider that prevented drivers from making a left turn across a double yellow line into the preschool his kids attended, which he compared to Trump’s border wall.

Courts, Police, public disclosure

Seattle Police Guild Sues Police Department Over Public Records Delays
Photo by Derek Simeone, via Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-2.0 license

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Officers Guild has filed a lawsuit against the Seattle Police Department over its practice of “grouping” multiple public disclosure requests from a single requester and responding to them one at a time, a policy that allows SPD to sit on more recent requests for years while slowly fulfilling older ones.

The lawsuit stems from nine requests SPOG filed between 2020 and 2025; the oldest, from March 11, 2020, is more than five years old. SPOG is asking the police department to hand over the records and pay its attorney fees.

“Our biggest gripe,” SPOG president Mike Solan said, is that SPD has determined that SPOG is a “high user” of the system, “and therefore it will take too long to process [our requests.] And for us, when we see other entities granted what appear to be really quick turnoarounds, in terms of days, if not a week, when we’ve got yearslong requests that are not being granted, there’s something not right with the system in terms of being fair and balanced.”

Earlier this year, the Seattle Times sued SPD on similar grounds, alleging that SPD was failing to follow the terms of its earlier settlement over the grouping issue. In that settlement, SPD explicitly agreed not to group records requests made more than eight weeks apart—not just for the Seattle Times, but for everyone.

The records SPOG is seeking range from videos of what the lawsuit refers to as the 2020 protests, which the lawsuit refers to as “riots,” as well as records about officers’ job assignments; the city’s decision in early 2020 to reconstitute its encampment removal team, which had included police; and documents related to the city’s adoption of Workday, a new payroll system that has issued inaccurate paychecks to many city employees, including police.

“When applying the Grouping Policy, SPD processes only one grouped request at a time, placing the others on hold as if the PRA obligations are suspended,” SPOG’s lawsuit says. “This practice adds lengthy delays to an already slow process for obtaining SPD records, and signals to the requester that any additional requests will be futile.”

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SPD’s public disclosure division allows requesters to pick a single request for a public disclosure officer to answer, in its entirety, before starting on the second request on the list. “In other words,” the lawsuit says, “the City deliberately creates a circumstance where a requestor is required to acquiesce to the City’s improper Grouping Policy in order to supposedly enable the City to process a request that is more important to the requestor.

As we’ve reported previously, PubliCola currently has nine requests stuck in the grouping process, with SPD working on just one request. At SPD’s current rate of progress, we don’t expect answers to most of our requests for many years, if ever, and have more or less stopped filing requests. By creating a policy that allows SPD’s legal department to delay records requests indefinitely SPD has effectively overturned the state Public Disclosure Act for anyone else who files multiple records requests.

Several years ago, compounding this problem for members of the press, SPD’s media relations department began responding to basic media questions by telling (certain) reporters to file a records request—knowing full well, based on experience, that filing a request was about as effective than screaming into a hole in the ground. (The media folks got better once Sue Rahr replaced Adrian Diaz as interim chief a year ago; the public disclosure response team, which is part of SPD’s legal division, did not.).

City Attorney Ann Davison’s office filed a terse response to the lawsuit that denied the allegations but did not go into detail about why they believe SPD is in the right. Davison’s office declined to comment.

“We hope that this lawsuit will illustrate our concerns with [SPD] not following the rules,” Solan said. “I think that is a fair thing to ask: Change the policy and grant us our public disclosure requests.”