Situation

Briefly, here's the gist of what's going on.

Prior to 1996, cities could do whatever they wanted in gouging money from property owners. The City did so. When Proposition 218 passed in 1996, the City was in a dilemma. It could change the street lighting assessment methodology to comply with the new law or it could try to convince voters to place a special tax (2/3 vote) on themselves. The City did neither. The earlier street lighting assessment was grand-fathered in by the new law. It's been in place for 30 years, unchanged.

Now, the City wants to gouge property owners again. They need to pretend that property owners get a special benefit from street lighting over and above the benefit to the general public. The City comes up with a point system to account for proportionality (constitutional requirement) for allocating the cost among property owners. The City has to separate the property owner benefit from the general public benefit (constitutional requirement). It presumes that all benefits (100%) fall to the property owners. Then the City comes up with a method to determine public benefit, but can ONLY find benefit based on street traffic. The result is a fraudulent 11% public benefit, sticking the property owners with almost the entire bill, without proving that they get any benefit at all.

Thursday, May 7, 2026

City Clerk Loses Election Records

City Clerk's Office Can't Find the Records for the June 2nd Street Lighting Assessment Election

We connected with a lawyer willing to make a public records request for the data file that was used to create the individualized ballots for each property owner subject to the special benefit assessment. The request was made on May 1, 2026.

Today, the City Clerk (who is the elections official conducting the election) closed the request. The reason?

"As of this date, our office has determined that the Office of the City Clerk is not in possession of any documents or information relating to your request."

The closing note goes on to suggest that the Bureau of Street Lighting may have the records.

Note the poster was identified as 'Staff.' No City employee wants to take responsibility.

We were requesting the data file used by the elections official (the city clerk) to print and mail the ballots for the special benefit street lighting election.

NextRequest.com

The City uses a third-party software vendor, CivicPlus, to handle public records requests. It claims to be "Modern FOIA & Public Records Request Software." The software requires that a requester have an account to access the records. The software and all the data, including the accounts, is located on the vendor's servers.

We tried to document the City's failure to know what it's doing by archiving the page. While The Wayback Machine (archive.org) did its job, the archived page goes into a never-ending loop while trying to display the page. We surmise that the vendor doesn't want its results permanently available for public viewing. So much for 'public' records.

Nowhere in the California Public Records Act does it authorize an agency subject to the Act to force the public to create an account with a third-party vendor.

We've encountered this vendor before with the County of Riverside. In that case, we couldn't even view the records without creating an account (which we didn't).

The City is not only corrupt, but also does everything it can to frustrate the public.

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