Supervisor Barger also deleted texts during the firestorms, like Bass did.
Fires in LA: Scandal Over Missing Text Messages
LA Mayor Karen Bass and County Supervisor Kathryn Barger have found themselves in a furor over deleted text messages during the region's disastrous January blaze.
But it ain't just Bass causing all the ruckus.
Turns out, Supervisor Barger, who reps the Eaton fire-ravaged area, is regularly purging her texts too, says her spokesperson. "Barger's iPhone auto-delete setting is set to 30 days. She also manually deletes her texts sometimes," spoke up Helen Chavez Garcia last month.
The LA Times dug up a public records request for Barger's communications with Bass from Jan. 7 to late February. Guess what? Nada. Zilch. Zip. Not a peep, despite Barger publicly admitting that she texted Bass late into the night on Jan. 7 while the mayor was en route to the city after a diplomatic sojourn to Ghana.
Five other supervisors – Lindsey Horvath, Hilda Solis, Holly Mitchell, and Janice Hahn – don't use the auto-delete function on their phones, according to their spokespeople.
Chavez Garcia confessed in an email that there's no pre-determined criteria for which messages Barger manually wipes.
Constance Farrell, a spokesperson for Horvath, implied that county officials were supposed to preserve their texts for two years to comply with the county's record retention policy. Horvath's office eventually spilled some of her texts in February after the Times' public records request. Those texts showed her locking horns with Bass during the inferno.
Curiously, the county's record retention guidelines don't mention text messages, but say that routine "administrative records" should be kept for two years.
The board's executive office claimed that the public records act applies to text messages, though some might be shielded from disclosure.
"Whether a supervisor's text is a public record depends on whether it's regarding the conduct of the peoples' business," Steven Hernandez, the chief deputy for the executive office, said in a statement.
According to county policy, employees must sign an agreement every year acknowledging that all electronic communications, like emails or instant messages, sent on county devices are the property of the county.
Before Bass, she used a 30-day auto-delete setting for her phone, significantly shorter than the two-year retention period laid out in the city's administrative code. But after some prodding from The Times, which had submitted public records requests for the mayor's correspondence during the Palisades fire, Bass' office claimed they were able to resurrect the deleted messages via "specialized technology."
SoCal
LA Mayor's Texts Paint a Vivid Picture of Early Fire Response
Bass' texts paint a vivid picture of the remote collaboration she maintained with her team and various levels of government, orchestrating federal resources as the flames grew rampant. They also reveal a resident desperate to get home.
(The Times took the city to court in March over the mayor's texts. Despite city officials eventually providing some texts, The Times is contesting the city's stance that releasing them wasn't mandated under state law.)
It's still uncertain whether LA City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who stepped in as acting mayor in Bass' absence when the fires struck, cleared out his texts during that period.
After The Times filed a public records request for correspondence between Harris-Dawson and Bass between Jan. 6 and Jan. 16, Harris-Dawson's office said it had "no responsive records."
Over a long stretch of time, Harris-Dawson's office didn't respond to repeated queries about why there was no correspondence and whether it had been deleted.
"It's mighty disheartening to see that practice's made its way up the street [to the County]. I was hoping it was justCity Hall's silly hijinks and the absurdities of our two main honchos," said Rob Quan, the founder of Unrig LA, referring to Bass and Harris-Dawson.
Quan, who heads a transparency crusade-focused good-government advocacy group, believed that proper record-keeping from January would be all the more crucial given the historical significance of the blazes.
- The controversy over missing text messages in Los Angeles' government extends beyond Mayor Karen Bass, as County Supervisor Kathryn Barger's texts were also found to be regularly deleted.
- Technology plays a significant role in this scandal, with smartphone auto-delete settings and specialized recovery methods affecting the preservation of important communications.
- Law and policy-and-legislation come into play as the California Public Records Act and the county's record retention policy are being debated, with some arguing that text messages should be treated as public records.
- The controversy over missing texts has sparked discussions about transparency and accountability in both Los Angeles City Hall and the County, with some expressing concern that the practice of deleting texts could be a broader issue in local politics.
- The deletion of texts during a critical period, such as the January fires, raises questions about decision-making processes and collaboration between government officials, business leaders, and other stakeholders in California's vast general-news and crime-and-justice landscape.
