The former vice mayor said that she offered to leave all of her files, along with a database of contacts for District 10, for Nancy Pyle, the incoming District 10 city councilwoman.

"I told her that one of my biggest mistakes when I started was keeping all of Joe Head's records. I lugged them around for a year," said Dando, who served the final 18 months of Head's term.

According to Dando, Pyle also agreed that she didn't want to keep her predecessor's database of contacts for District 10. "I recommended she start afresh, so she could set it up how she wants to," said Dando. "I haven't heard anything to indicate they don't have everything they need."

Dando said she would have left everything if that's what Pyle had wanted. "It would have been easier on us, honestly," she said, referring to the effort needed to box up 10 years of files.

Pyle, for her part, said she and her staff have a different recollection of that discussion.

"No, it was my understanding that Pat would delete outdated and old files but leave all the active ones," Pyle said. "We were left 12 active files. Period. The database was never part of our discussion. As the new councilmember for District 10, my office is expected to have a certain level of information, and not having the records has put us at a disadvantage."

Pyle's chief of staff, Ana Maria Rosato, was also present at the meeting with the outgoing councilwoman. Her recollection of the meeting syncs with Pyle's.

"Pat Dando indicated she would delete outdated and completed files. In other words, not active projects," said Rosato. "While Ms. Dando may have kept some private records at the office, both the councilmember and I think of these district records as public, not private."

The new administration is now painstakingly checking with other city departments to ascertain the current status of all District 10 projects.

Public or private?

Removing files raises concerns that public records may have been whisked away beyond the public's reach—an act considered a felony under California Government Code 6200, punishable by two to four years of prison.

The Almaden Youth Association's sports complex project has been and continues to be the subject of three California Public Records Act (CPRA) requests filed by the Almaden Resident in 2004. Although the city attorney's office finally produced a stack of documents and emails five feet tall, the newspaper believes more documents remain to be seen.

San Jose Senior Deputy City Attorney Renee Gurza told the Resident's attorney that the removal of files would be looked into to guarantee that no public documents were taken.

Other city council members said starting with an empty office is something of a tradition at San Jose City Hall. Council members Chuck Reed, Ken Yeager and Judy Chirco all said they were left just a few files, although Reed said he did inherit a database of names and addresses for District 4.

Mostly, the housecleaning is a practical measure that saves council members from being buried by a paper avalanche, said Reed. "The paper flow is enormous and anything important can usually be retrieved from the clerk or a department," he added.

Except for emails

California law regards emails as public records. However, the city of San Jose keeps emails a minimum of three months to maintain storage space, with no backup archive.

Tom Manheim, spokesman for the city manager's office, explained that the city's record retention policy depends on what type of record is involved.

"If it's a public record under CPRA, it's a public record as long as we maintain it. However, the act doesn't specify which records must be maintained, nor for how long," Manheim said. Meetings involving elected officials, city staff, and outside organizations may or may not generate public records, he said.

Terry Francke, an attorney who specializes in open government issues, said, "It's a custom here and there" for officials to take their records along when leaving office.

Francke served 14 years as general counsel for the California First Amendment Coalition and works in the same capacity for Californians Aware. He said the city of San Francisco amended its "Sunshine Ordinance" in 2000 to require public officials to leave their records behind.

"If a record that's already been the subject of a CPRA request was removed, that's very serious. Its removal or destruction removes it from possible adjudication. It comes close to destruction of evidence, in my view," Francke said.

A public official's personal notes aren't normally considered public records. But Dando and her staff served as the point of contact between the city and the AYA.

"The presumption has to be that all her records have to be public records," Francke said.

Unanswered questions

The city attorney's office, as a result of the Resident's CPRA requests, has many of the records from Dando's office regarding the sports complex. But not all. And many of the documents reviewed by the Resident raised more questions than they answered:

• Why did Dando's office originally insist that city staff were not to contact the AYA directly, but instead pass requests for information about the ostensibly private nonprofit group to her office?

• Why did Dando's staff consult with the city attorney's office about a $25,000 grant the AYA received in 1998 which was ultimately transferred to The Spot youth center at Bret Harte Middle School? In the last weeks of her time in office, Dando and aide Denelle Fedor ignored questions about that grant, as did the city attorney's office. Instead Deputy City Attorney Gurza told the Resident that that information should not have been disclosed and that the paper was not to ask questions about it.

• Why did Dando tell the Resident in August that she only had $650,000 in her district funds to give to the sports complex when as far back as September 2003 emails between her office, planning staff, and parks and recreation staff indicated that she had $1.3 million to drop into the complex's bucket?

There are additional questions—such as why did a summary of an AYA "task force" meeting held in February 2004 indicate that Dando was to follow up with the Great Oaks Water Company, which provides water to some residents of the South Almaden Valley Urban Reserve—that are equally impossible to answer without viewing the complete record files.

Follow-through

The legislative path for the sports complex was cleared on Dec. 7 when the city council certified the project's environmental impact report and passed a General Plan amendment that would allow construction of the complex in the urban reserve.

The AYA will be in charge of maintaining and operating the multimillion-dollar complex. The city council has not yet approved the actual project itself. Lawsuits filed by reserve residents opposing the construction of the complex may drag the process out for years. The city council, driven by Dando, has been the only legislative body to approve the EIR and GPA—Santa Clara County, Local Agency Formation Commission (a countywide land-use agency), and the San Jose Planning Commission all denounced the sports complex citing environmental problems and the potential for opening the reserve to premature development.

Without a complete, behind-the-scenes history of a project that was 10 years in the making, how will the new District 10 councilwoman be able to make informed decisions about the future of the sports complex?