Federal investigators are improperly trying to redact the names of top former Los Angeles city officials from court documents related to a Department of Water and Power (DWP) billing scandal that “shattered public confidence” in the legal profession, open-records advocates say.
The group Consumer Watchdog and the Los Angeles Times urged the the Central District of California court not to accept the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s (USAO) position that about 1,400 pages of warrant materials need to be redacted to protect the privacy and due-process rights of top-ranking former city officials who were in office during the public utility’s 2013-2014 billing scandal.
In a memorandum in support for unsealing court records in the now-completed federal probe, Consumer Watchdog and the Times argue that the scope and scale of corruption involving the DWP and the City Attorney’s Office is “unprecedented.”
“... Those redactions should be extremely limited,” the applicants said in their March 21 filing with the federal court. “Access to the warrant materials is essential to enable the public to ‘keep a watchful eye on the workings of public agencies’ regarding important matters of public concern, and to evaluate the charging decisions of the USAO.”
Four former officials have been sentenced as a result of the DWP investigation. Working with the company PricewaterhouseCoopers, the DWP launched a new billing system a decade ago, resulting in a cascade of errors that affected ratepayers and sparked multiple class-action lawsuits. City officials responded by filing a lawsuit that eventually subsumed the other litigation, and they manipulated the plaintiffs’ attorney to gain favorable terms, according to prosecutors.
The strategy was to shift blame for the scandal from city officials to the PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting firm, prosecutors alleged.
A former employee of city Special Counsel Paul Kiesel later vowed to expose the city’s involvement in the scam lawsuit, and “senior members of the City Attorney’s Office” agreed to an $800,000 extortion payment to silence the employee, according to court documents.
One of the attorneys involved in exposing the scandal, Tim Blood of Blood, Hurst & O’Reardon LLP, told the Southern California Record that taxpayers have paid a massive amount of money to resolve the scandal and yet it’s still unclear what role top city officials played in the billing scandal manipulations.
“The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office spent a lot of time and public resources investigating the scandal, so the fruits of that investigation should be made public,” Blood said. “By all accounts, senior officials at the City Attorney’s office and at the DWP, along with prominent lawyers hired as special counsel, played at least some role. The public has a right to know how much of a role they played.”
About 33 search warrants and supporting documents are involved in the dispute over whether names of uncharged individuals investigated by federal officials should be redacted, according to the Consumer Watchdog filing.
“The main dispute relates to the proposed redactions to protect the ‘privacy, reputational and due process concerns’ of uncharged city leadership entangled in the web of sham litigation, extortion and subsequent cover-up by redacting their names and identities, including the names of former City Attorney Mike Feuer and a former member of the DWP Board of Commissioners,” the applicants’ reply brief states.
The Consumer Watchdog and Times filing indicates credible but uncorroborated sources allege that employees of the City Attorney’s Office and the DWP, including Feuer, were involved in directing the filing of the sham lawsuit or were part of the subsequent cover-up.
Privacy, reputational or due-process concerns of those higher-ups who were not charged in the federal investigation are insufficient to overcome the public’s right to have access to this information, the filing says.
The public has a right to know what roles Feuer and former Chief Deputy City Attorney Jim Clark had in overseeing the legal strategies in the billing scandal and whether DWP leaders such as David Wright and David Alexander were involved, the Consumer Watchdog filing says.
A hearing on the redaction issue is scheduled on April 12 before federal District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr.