Suit: S.J. failed to record Google meetings

Working Partnerships USA and the First Amendment Coalition allege San Jose negotiated land sale secretly

The plaintiffs in a lawsuit critical of the way San Jose handled the sale of land to Google blasted the city for its dealings with the tech giant after a hearing in the case Thursday at a downtown courthouse.

“The people are the boss of the government, not the other way around,” said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, one of the groups that filed the suit.

Google is in the midst of preparing to build a major campus near Diridon Station. Last year, the Mercury News revealed that a number of city officials signed nondisclosure agreements with the company to discuss land use and other details of Google’s plans in San Jose. In December, the City Council voted to allow Google to buy several parcels of city- owned land, with the option to buy more.

Critics of the sale — including Working Partnerships USA, a San Jose-based organization that also is suing the city in the case — alleged the sale of land was worked out in secret, without giving residents a fair chance to weigh in.

“The public deserves to know what is being negotiated,” said Jeffrey Buchanan, the group’s public policy director.

The suit, which aims to pry loose city records related to the Google project, alleges city officials violated disclosure law by having wide-ranging discussions about the sale behind closed doors. It also accuses the city of stonewalling and failing to fully provide public records requested by the First Amendment Coalition and Working Partnerships.

The City Attorney’s Office disputes those allegations, saying San Jose has released thousands of pages of documents.

“It’s simply not true that we’re stonewalling on anything,” said Nora Frimann, an assistant city attorney. “The city’s been very forthcoming with the documents.”

Frimann said the city is with

holding some documents, but “for good reasons,” such as during ongoing negotiations.

“Petitioners have no plain, speedy and adequate remedy to obtain the records they have requested, other than this petition,” the suit says.

“I feel the whole process hasn’t been adequately transparent,” said Sandy Perry, head of the Affordable Housing Network of Santa Clara County, who is concerned that Google coming to town will increase homelessness and housing problems.

In June, Google pledged to spend $1 billion addressing the region’s housing crisis.

But Perry and others aren’t convinced San Jose will require Google to offer enough benefits — from housing to parks and education programs — to the community to offset any negative effects.

The public, Buchanan said, needs more information from the city to fully evaluate the project’s effects on traffic, displacement and other issues.

“We’re perfectly intelligent and able to look at things and evaluate things,” said Claudia Shope, a San Jose resident and advocate for more transparency from the city.

Among the more egregious issues that have come to light through the case is the city’s failure to record a number of closed sessions as required by law. In a March letter regarding the case, City Attorney Rick Doyle blamed the missing recordings on technical mistakes.

“When we downloaded the memory chip on the audio recorder used in closed session, we learned that a large number of files never loaded, including all of the closed sessions that took place in 2017,” Doyle wrote. “Our IT department investigated why the files did not load and concluded that our practice of pulling the plug on the audio recorder at the end of a recording session did not allow the files to properly load onto the memory chip.”

The error, Buchanan said, will prevent residents from ever knowing for sure what happened in the meetings.

“There’s still a lot more we know we don’t know,” Snyder said.

The judge is expected to issue a decision in the case in the coming weeks.

“We really need this to be a public process,” Buchanan said. “Just because a big tech company wants to come to San Jose and build doesn’t mean that we should abandon our principles of transparency, open government and democracy.”

Contact Emily DeRuy at 408-920- 5077.