City agrees to turn over Macerich correspondence
CITY HALL — Members of the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City will have their hands full this week as they review more than 6,500 pages of internal communications between city staff, elected officials and the owners of Santa Monica Place.
The coalition, which sued City Hall for scores of e-mails, traffic studies and other documents relating to the redevelopment of the mall, is trying to determine how a simple facelift for the aging facility turned into a multi-million dollar redevelopment project — complete with three 21-story residential towers, an eight-story office building and an eight-story apartment building. Those buildings were to be built on top of a new outdoor mall, which developers described as a natural extension of the Third Street Promenade.
That proposal was shelved by the City Council in August 2005 following strong opposition from residents as well as uncertainty about the future of Robinsons-May, which had just been purchased by Federated Department Stores Inc. Federated, which owns Macy’s, closed the store in March as part of the merger.
“The e-mails are particularly invaluable information because they show how business is being done between the city and the developer (Macerich Inc.), and in the case of Santa Monica Place, those e-mails show just how emboldened Macerich was to submit a proposal that was completely out of scale for Santa Monica,” said Diana Gordon, co-chair of the coalition, which was formed in response to the Macerich proposal. “The city was reluctant all along to provide us with this information and continually gave us excuses as to why we couldn’t have them. That’s why we had to file a lawsuit.”
A settlement was reached and approved by the City Council on April 11, with City Hall agreeing to hand over all documents requested by the coalition and to pay the coalition’s legal fees, which amounted to $36,000.
Deputy City Attorney Cara Silver, who worked on the lawsuit, said City Hall was not trying to obstruct the work of the coalition. Silver said the City Attorney’s Office handed over at least 457 documents consisting of 6,500 pages, while the settlement only dealt with 49 documents.
“The city always tries to work with requestees to help refine their search and we had a search that came in and we produced some documents, but the coalition felt there were more that needed to be released so they filed a lawsuit,” Silver said.
City Hall held back, Silver said, because the 49 pages, consisting mainly of internal e-mails, were considered protected under the public information act under the scope of deliberative process privilege.
“It boils down to protecting parties, both private and public, during contract negotiations or real estate deals, things of that nature where both sides do not want to disclose their strategy to the other party,” Silver said. “We felt these e-mails fell under that protection, particularly because there was no deal being discussed.”
Silver said recent constitutional amendments put into question this privilege, leading the City Attorney’s Office to settle the case.
“The issue hadn’t been litigated by the court and council directed these e-mails be turned over, given the deep public interest in the project,” Silver said.
Councilman Richard Bloom, an attorney, said the law surrounding deliberative process privileged is “still a work in progress,” so it is typical for requests to be closely examined and challenged by both sides.
“It’s not necessarily about who’s right or wrong,” Bloom said. “The city is in the position of having to represent the best interests of everyone in the city and sometimes the disclosure of information, while in the best interest of a particular group, is not in the best interest for the city. In this case, a resolution was reached and in that context, the law provides we pay attorney fees, so that’s why we are paying the bill.”
SMCLC has another public records request pending with the city for development agreements City Hall has entered into and bdocuments relating to the monitoring of developer’s compliance with these agreements, Gordon said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 24, 2006. Read the original PDF.