By Michael Petrelis
Sure wish I knew what brought a complete turnaround from City Attorney Dennis Herrera and his staff regarding my May request for his right-hand's emails, which are created with taxpayer infrastructure and public documents. I'd like to repeat the achievement here with other elected officials.
Herrera's City-funded site now includes a Resources page entitled "Michael Petrelis Requested Records" (http://tinyurl.com/SFCityAtty-Petrelis-page), and reads:
"[Here] are records responsive to Michael Petrelis' request for emails to and from Tara Collins between March 1 and May 28, 2014. Because the large file sizes -- which together exceed 68 MB -- may be unwieldy for some email systems, these have been uploaded to this web page for the requester's convenience."
A huge leap forward for San Francisco government transparency has been accomplished with these emails now on the web and just a few clicks away.
First, the City Attorney ended months of ignoring my request. Second, the office profusely apologized for the tardiness and neglect in responding. Third, they agreed to produce the public records.
Now, the fourth and biggest sunshine accomplishment here is the City Attorney has previously unreleased public records, a total of six (6) volumes, available for anyone to read.
This development begs the question of why can't we have Herrera and every City department sharing every public records request made to them and the responsive documents posted on their department's web sites? Doing this on a monthly basis would greatly expand San Francisco's City Hall transparency and make our elected officials more accountable to taxpayers.
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