Editorials

Things you’d never know if you didn’t read the papers…even the local Knight-Ridder-CocoTimes-Lesher-Hills-faux-front offspring that appears in driveways in upscale zip codes from time to time. From the Berkeley manifestation of this conglomerate publishing empire, we learn that our mayor was “frosted” because a memo addressed to him by a city attorney found its way into the Berkeley Daily Planet. Since the mayor’s office didn’t honor us with his comments, we’ll quote the full item from Knight-Ridder’s Berkeley Voice, for those of you who live in the flats and don’t see it: 

“A security lockdown is taking place at City Hall as a result of a recent story in a local newspaper that quoted a confidential memo from Assistant City Attorney Zach Cowan to Mayor Tom Bates.  

“Locks have been changed, computer passwords have been replaced and city staffers will no longer be able to access their files from home.  

“‘Somebody either broke into our office or hacked into our computer to get that memo,’ said Bates.  

“‘Either way, it was a serious violation of lawyer-client confidentiality. We’re not going to go on any witch hunts, but we have to prevent it from happening again. But it breaks my heart to see the openness with which we have traditionally conducted the public’s business in Berkeley so badly abused.’ 

“Adding insult to injury, Bates said, ‘What really frosts me is that despite all the underhanded lengths they went to, they still got the story wrong!’” 

What’s wrong with this silly scenario? Quite a lot, actually. First, what the Planet got was an anonymous copy of a fax of a printout of an e-mail. Given today’s electronic technology, changing the locks at City Hall and changing computer passwords won’t do much to stop that kind of leak, which could easily have originated in a recycling bin somewhere. And “a serious violation of lawyer-client confidentiality?” The attorney-client privilege has never been construed as banning the press from reporting on information about legal opinions provided to government by staff, and we hope no one in the city attorney’s office has told Mayor Bates that it does.  

Also, what’s this about getting the story wrong? What story? We got a copy of what seemed to be a memo from a city attorney. Those of us who had seen previous memos from the same attorney decided, on strictly literary criteria analyzing prose style, that it was authentic, so we printed it. Period. No one from the city has stepped forward to deny the memo’s authenticity or authorship. Is there anything more that we might have missed? 

What’s more important is how good the attorney’s advice was, and how the mayor intends to use it. The memo opines that UC is claiming exemption from city zoning. But another anonymous source, this one inside the University of California, tells the Planet that UC’s planners and attorneys have been taking for granted, for a long time, that UC is already required to follow local zoning restrictions for commercial projects like hotels. An internal memo to that effect has circulated inside the UC administration, seen by many. (And no, we didn’t have to break into an office or hack a computer to get that tip. People trust us with important information, perhaps even more than they trust their employers.) The source gave us the case references on which UC’s belief is based. We looked them up, and they seem to check out. So why have the city attorney and the mayor been strategizing about how the city can change its zoning to accommodate UC, in the memo’s words, to “bulletproof any city approval”? Whose side are they on, anyway?  

If the office of the mayor wants to answer some of these questions, or to complain about anything that appears in the Planet about their activities, our pages are open to them, as always.  

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Daily Planet.