The Complaints Committee of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force voted last week to approve an allegation that Sup. Joel Engardio failed to provide public records of his calendar—particularly, a meeting with a big donor and political consultant around the closure of the Great Highway.
The committee asked the full task force to consider whether the violation was intentional and willful—which could trigger a full Ethics Commission investigation.
It’s a strange situation: Richard Corriea, a retired police commander who supports the Engardio Recall, asked for the supervisor’s appointments calendar, which by law is a public record.
He received a response showing 343 meetings over the course of several months—but one single meeting, which happened to involve the Great Highway (a central issue in the recall) was missing.
Engardio had disclosed that meeting to another constituent in an earlier request. But when Correa asked, that one meeting—with a tech executive who was pushing to close the Great Highway and a political consultant—was deleted.
Engardio’s chief of staff, Jonathan Goldberg, came to the hearing to represent the supervisor, and freely admitted that the meeting, involving consultant Todd David and tech executive Lucas Lux, took place and was missing from the calendar disclosure.
Then he did what some politicians have done for years, and it drives me nuts: He blamed the interns.
Goldberg told the committee that unpaid interns handled the Microsoft Word doc that contained Engardio’s schedule. Somehow, he said, someone must have made a mistake and deleted a meeting that had a significant impact on the defining issue in the recall.
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Joel Engardio is an elected official. He has a staff of four people, all of whom make a very reasonable salary. The interns work for free.
Blaming the unpaid workers for this sort of mistake is not just a copout; it’s gross. It happens all too often. It not only deflects the blame; it suggests that you don’t take any responsibility for the work of (unpaid) people you supervise.
The hearing showed how low-tech Engardio’s record keeping is: His calendar, a legally required public document, was in a single Microsoft Word file—and according to testimony at the hearing, appeared to be on a Mac computer, which the city doesn’t use. That would mean it was on someone’s private laptop.
It’s not too hard to put this kind of data in a Google doc, that gets updates whenever something changes. After this bizarre deletion, Goldberg said, Engardio has moved to that technology.
But in the meantime, Goldberg said under questioning, they have no idea which intern did the deletion.
Dean Schmidt, who chairs the Complaint Committee, asked Goldberg if he was involved in any discussion about this meeting or deleting the item.
Goldberg: “I don’t recall any discussion.”
That, as anyone who has ever followed politics or law knows, is a long way from “no.”
Schmidt: “Nothing else disappeared except that exact item?”
Goldberg: “I hope there is not, I am not aware of anything.”
Schmidt: “Do you know the substance of the meeting?”
Goldberg: “It is no secret that Todd David is a political consultant and the Lucas Lux firmly believed in the creation of the Great Highway park. The meeting was to introduce the two of them.” Because, of course, it was clear that there would be a political battle over the issue.
Schmidt then asked Corriea if he had reviewed the two versions of the calendar. “I can see no other change,” Corriea said. “Everything else tracked.”
Again: There were 344 entries in the document. Only one was deleted, and that one involved a politically sensitive meeting on a matter that Correia was pursuing.
This could all be, as Engardio told me, a simple error, the contents of the meeting just a coincidence. But that would be one hell of a coincidence; as one speaker, a D4 resident who is a data scientist, put it, when only one meeting out of 344 is missing, “that’s pretty strong odds.”
Correia said the metadata on the document he received “shows it was residing on an Apple computer. I don’t think the city uses Apple, so it might have been a personal computer.”
All of the committee members agreed that Engardio failed to produce a responsive record. Engardio doesn’t dispute that. The issue the panel addressed is whether the action was intentional—which could trigger a much larger investigation by the Ethics Commission.
The members also agreed that Ethics has been very reluctant to find that any Sunshine Ordinance violations were intentional; the bar is very high. But Ethics could subpoena witnesses that the task force can’t.
In the end, the three members voted to send the matter to the full Task Force to consider not just the obvious violation but the question of intent.
That will happen at a Sept. 3 meeting.
At any rate, the Ethics Commission has never taken seriously its mandate to enforce the Sunshine Ordinance.
But this one is certainly curious.
