They Promised Effective, Responsive, and Transparent Government and This Is What They Gave Us
It’s a strange world we live in.
We made two Public Record Requests (PRR). The object of the first one was to get information from the City of Modesto regarding how the City Attorney obfuscates the amounts Modesto pays for legal fees in general, including those we have to pay to his firm, Meyers Nave. City Attorney Adam Lindgren had his para legal respond (see accompanying picture) by scrambling their response. Adam took exception to my characterizing his response as ‘scrambled’ at the 8/13/19 Council meeting. We can only presume he prefers the term ‘randomizing.’
Each of these entries is him cannibalizing parts of budgets of other departments to use for legal expenses. In other words he gets to spend other departments’ money for his legal costs without it being reflected against his office. He likes to say this has been an ongoing practice but this basically was initiated soon after his firm took over as City Attorney. So lets review…stealing from other department’s budgets for legal fees is a “past practice” that he started when he and his firm took over being City Attorney in 2013. He justifies it by simply calling it past practice.
Another interesting observation is that his department received the files in chronological order but as you can tell he made analyzing the costs more difficult by his, and we’ll use the term Adam apparently prefers here, ‘randomizing’ their response. This picture is shown as an example of the technique he employed and not the information inside the files themselves.
His response to the he second PRR is more of his modus operandi (read method or technique). It was a simple request designed to discover when he knew Monica Houston brought the problem of purchasing property around Rt. 132 to light and when he recused himself from the discussion like an ethical attorney would.
To: Stephanie Lopez; Dana Sanchez
Subject: Public Record Request
—–Original Message—–
From: Dana Sanchez <dasanchez@modestogov.com>
To: westernpalms@aol.com <westernpalms@aol.com>
Sent: Fri, Aug 9, 2019 3:24 pm
Subject: Public Records Request of July 16, 2019 Ref: 3194
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2019 4:10 PM
To: Stephanie Lopez; Dana Sanchez
Subject: Public Record Request