The claims have always been dubious, according to experts on state privacy and labor relations statutes. Law enforcement officers are strongly protected by both state laws and a controversial court interpretation of those laws. But rank-and-file government managers and employees who make mistakes have long been exposed or protected at the whims of city managers or mayors or school district superintendents.

The California First Amendment Coalition notes that governments officials often assert that personnel, medical and similar files are exempt from disclosure: “This exemption is routinely invoked when the public agency believes a request seeks information pertaining to identifiable public officials or employees that is private, sensitive or controversial. But in fact, the information may only be withheld if its disclosure ‘would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.’ (Government Code § 6254(c)). That is, and is meant to be, a high threshold.”

Now a potentially landmark case is unfolding in San Diego Unified, the state’s second-largest school district, that could expose the discretionary nature of government officials’ sweeping claims of privacy for employee conduct.

Near the end of the 2013-14 school year at the district’s School of Creative and Performing Arts, Superintendent Cindy Marten refused to disclose the specific details of the decision to abruptly reassign Principal Mitzi Lizarraga and lock her out of the school. Rumored penalties given to a school counselor were also judged as protected by privacy laws.

But then the heat built on Marten and school board President Marne Foster over several Foster actions that raised questions about her ethics and judgment. A May 2015 grand jury report, without naming Foster, blamed a school board member for the School of Creative and Performing Arts’ shakeup. The grand jury corroborated what school activists had said about Foster reacting with fury to a negative college recommendation for her son, who was a senior in 2013-14, and said the district needed better rules to prevent improper board member interference.

Three months later, in the district’s official response, Marten dismissed the grand jury report as too vague to act on and as calling for safeguards against board member interference that were already in place.

School district cites privacy exemption, then says never mind

But Voice of San Diego pursued the matter and landed the first interviews with Lizarraga, now principal of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, and  Kim Abagat, a counselor who had been suspended for nine days.

Both described Foster as a nightmarish force at their school. Abagat said she had been punished for accurately describing her son’s record at the school. Lizarraga said she was abruptly reassigned by one of Marten’s top aides after Foster’s son was barred from the prom because of behavioral lapses.

This led Marten to issue 61 pages of internal district documents, including a private investigator’s report, that she said showed that she and the district had responded properly to Foster’s interference at the school and that the district had been justified in its personnel decisions. The superintendent said because of their interviews, the district was now justified in releasing information about Lizarraga and Abagat it had previously said it could never release.

But Lizarraga and Abagat didn’t agree, and they have hired a San Diego criminal defense lawyer, who strongly hinted a lawsuit was to come because the privacy rights of his clients had been abused. Such a lawsuit could be a landmark in that it might establish just how much of a right to privacy that school employees have, and if those rights are somehow vacated when they publicly respond to criticism of their job performance.

There is a bizarre element to the case. District documents credibly showed why Abagat’s punishment may have been deserved; counselors with deep concerns about students are supposed to pass college evaluations on to colleagues who may have a different opinion. She also got basic information about Foster’s son wrong.

However, Lizarraga wasn’t punished; she was reassigned to a position invented for her that she held for a few months before taking the Los Angeles job.

So San Diego Unified officials are in the peculiar position of saying Lizarraga’s job performance was so bad they had to abruptly promote her and that the decision wasn’t influenced by Foster’s fury over her son being punished and judged a poor college prospect but by a long accumulation of management miscues.

Lizarraga may not have much of a case that her privacy rights were violated. As the principal of a high-profile high school, reasons for her reassignment should be public record, according to the First Amendment Coalition. But when it comes to a defamation case, San Diego Unified’s vulnerability appears high.

New retrofit mandates meant to lower energy use and eventually costs are leaving many California companies with an early case of sticker shock.

The state Energy Commission says part of that might be the businesses’ fault and that some are misinterpreting the regulations and overestimating what they must do to comply.

In July, the state updated lighting requirements in the building code as part of an effort to lower commercial energy use by 30 percent. Business owners, electrical engineers and landlords say the new standards could add tens of thousands of dollars to companies’ cost to move into or upgrade already existing buildings.

The new rules set a lower cap on lighting wattage per square foot and encourage commercial property owners to outfit their buildings with controls and sensors that automatically dim lights when a room is unoccupied, or if natural light allows for lower intensity.

So many rules we barely hear about

If you haven’t heard about these rules, that’s because California promulgates so many such rules that the media often don’t cover them — unless the fallout hits pretty broadly.

But because of California’s role as a global laboratory for environmental regulation, lots of people outside CA pay attention to our rule-making. This unfolding debacle has already been featured prominently on the Real Clear Energy website, which has an international readership.

Here’s one of the horror stories the VOSD report cited:

The mandate to make those upgrades [even at properties that have undertaken conservation measures] can result in higher rents and less favorable leases for businesses moving in, said … David Marino, executive vice president of Hughes Marino, a commercial real estate company. …

Jim Herr, president of commercial furniture supplier Parron Hall Office Interiors, is one of those business owners facing a larger bill.

Hughes Marino has estimated the new regulatory changes will translate into a $64,000 to $72,000 bump in electrical retrofit work at the Kearny Mesa building Herr’s hoping to move into.

Herr is still negotiating his lease but hopes to secure one for about seven years. He doesn’t expect to reap energy savings that come anywhere close to the expense during his lease.

It could scarcely be more obvious that these rules weren’t thought through to consider their short- and medium-term effects on renters and property owners — because who cares about their interests inside the state Energy Commission?

I’ll give the final word on the new rules to Marino: They’re “the stupidest thing I’ve seen in my 25 years of commercial real estate.”

But an interesting wrinkle that hasn’t got much attention is that among those who have called out the mayor of California’s second-largest city for sexual harassment is the superintendent of California’s second-largest school district. Cindy Marten just hasn’t gone after San Diego’s dirty old man of a mayor publicly.

This detail came to light after Voice of San Diego wrote about an intern witnessing an apparent incident of some kind involving Filner and Marten in June.

This prompted former Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña, D-San Diego, to come forward with some more Filner-damning information:

“Update: After this story published, former Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña called to say Marten was one of the six prominent women she spoke with two years ago about Filner physically or verbally harassing them before Saldaña reported the issue to local Democratic Party leadership. The intern’s story, Saldaña said, ‘matches up with something I heard from Cindy two years ago.’ Saldaña declined to detail what Marten told her.”

This is a juicy detail that hasn’t gotten the play it deserves. It raises, um, questions about Filner’s 2012 campaign promise to get the mayor’s office much more involved with San Diego Unified. He may have wanted to personally consummate the partnership.

Sorry, didn’t mean to gross you out.

By Chris Reed

Cal Watchdog readers have been updated regularly on the goofiness and ugliness that’s unfolded in San Diego since veteran Democratic congressman Bob Filner took over as mayor in December. The two main themes of Filner coverage are his sheer stinking obnoxiousness and his sense that the law doesn’t apply to him because he’s such a noble guy. (He really thinks this; he was a Freedom Rider in the early 1960s, therefore he’s always pure.)

Now the two themes have meshed in a scandal that offers a perfect snapshot of the mayor of California’s second-largest city. This coverage is from the Voice of San Diego:

 “Mayor Bob Filner’s recently departed deputy chief of staff, Allen Jones, said Friday the mayor knew full well about a negotiation with a developer that many are calling extortion — and that he stands by it.

“Jones’ comments came hours after Filner announced he had returned a $100,000 donation to the city from the developer Sunroad. The mayor said he made the decision after he discovered a memo between a Sunroad representative and Jones that explicitly laid out a quid pro quo between the city and the developer.”

OK, that’s juicy enough. But why is Jones “recently departed”? Was it because of heat over the scandal that he blames on the mayor but which also makes him look bad?

That’s how the mayor rolls: ‘repeated humiliation of staff’

Nah. It’s because Jones thinks the mayor is obnoxious.

“Allen Jones, the longtime ally of Mayor Bob Filner, the one who set up his transition to mayor and worked as his deputy chief of staff said he resigned because of the mayor’s repeated humiliation of members of his staff.

“’On a number of occasions, I talked about how I thought the way the mayor interacted with and treated mayoral staff and members of boards and commissions and others was demeaning and abusive. And it, most importantly, undermined his ability to pursue the progressive agenda he campaigned on,’ Jones said.

“He said he couldn’t stand it any longer.

“’When I see mayor’s staff treated in that demeaning of a manner so often, if I remained, I believed I was being complicit in sustaining that abusive environment and I can’t do that,’ Jones said.”

So the mayor is blaming his extortion scandal on a top aide who just quit because he found the mayor to be obnoxious. I can’t think of any parallel to this, and I’m a political junkie.

Filner asks if anyone else wants to quit. As a matter of fact …

Wait, there’s more. Jones wasn’t the only top staffer to quit.

 “The mayor described a staff meeting in which Jones had brought up concerns about the way Filner was treating staff. When Jones said he was leaving, Filner said he asked if anyone else wanted to, and [communications director Irene] McCormack said she did.”

A fact that Filner didn’t reveal for a week — his press secretary abruptly quitting. This stuff is comedy gold.

At least if you don’t live within San Diego’s borders, where obnoxiousness, scandal and dysfunction in your city are more dismaying than entertaining.

By Chris Reed

One of the worst failings of journalists who cover California government is their failure when writing about budgets to always mention the automatic “step” raises that many public employees get each year, including most teachers, just for accumulating time on the job. These auto raises explain why government agencies depict any reduction in proposed spending increases as “cuts.” But they don’t explain why reporters do so.

In failing to offer this context, journalists let down their readers in many other ways as well. “Step” increases explain why pensions get so high and why so few public employees leave their jobs compared to those in the private sector. They also help explain why the productivity revolution never arrived in the public sector. The government status quo may be inefficient, but if it means there are lots of jobs where few people get fired and many/most people get automatic raises, then there is a huge constituency to keep it inefficient.

A reporter who provides context: It can be done

Which brings us to two very different recent stories in the California media.

Here’s what a sharp journalist sounds like when talking about how public employee pay works in California. It’s Will Carless of the Voice of San Diego in an Q&A with Bernie Rhinerson, a top San Diego Unified official:

“… three years ago, the board decided to hand out a whole slew of raises.

“Collective bargaining is give-and-take, and concessions.

“At that point in time, teachers gave up five days of paid work; they gave up almost 3 percent of their salary to get a promise of raises in the future. They got the kids through another year without big layoffs.

“And our teachers hadn’t had a raise in years.

“They had a raise in 2008, two years earlier.

“Well, that was before I came.

“They had had a raise, though.

“Well, that was five years ago now. Have you had a raise in five years?

“Sure, but now you’re repeating another canard. Most teachers in the district get raises every single year, just for staying alive. My wife does. Yes, I’ve had a raise, maybe one a year, but so have most teachers. As a communications person, don’t you think that we should start to be a bit more frank about terms like that? Why is an across-the-board raise any different (from) a step-and-column raise? They’re both raises.

“I’m not going to argue about the system in California.”

A reporter who is clueless: California’s sad norm

This sort of context should be required. Unfortunately, even in 2013, this sort of coverage of from the Los Angeles Daily News’ Christina Villacorte is still the norm:

“Los Angeles County employees, who are demanding pay raises after five years of going without, could see as much as $285 million in additional salaries and benefits in the coming fiscal year.

“The county is still negotiating with its various labor unions, but it provided that estimate to Moody’s Investors Service during an evaluation of its creditworthiness.

“County’s spokesman David Sommers emphasized that pay raises are a possibility — not a given.

“‘There are a number of proposals floating around about different scenarios of what salary and cost-of-living increases could look like,’ Sommers said. ‘That’s just one possible computation.’

“Sommers said the county provided that estimate because ‘the potential of salary increases — whether they happen or not — are things which rating agencies take into account when thinking about what’s next for us financially.'”

Don’t blame journalistic lapses on newspaper downsizing. It’s incompetence.

Note that Sommers apparently didn’t bother to tell Villacorte that, yes, lots of L.A. County employees got annual step raises, whether or not supervisors increased the broad pay scale of county employees in general after collective bargaining.

But why should he? Shouldn’t the Daily News reporter know this?

Of course.

But don’t blame this on the loss of “institutional knowledge” that resulted from the gutting of newspaper staffs over the past decade. I’ve lived in California since 1990. Even the Los Angeles Times at its bloated biggest — from, say, 1995 to 2003 — never routinely mentioned “step” pay hikes in writing about the state budget.

Why? Who knows? But it’s a black eye for California journalism whatever the reason.