A Mount Washington community group is asking a California appellate court to step into a land-use dispute that has exposed something larger – a Los Angeles City Hall practice that critics say lets officials make crucial decisions behind closed doors, with no public record.
In a new writ of mandate filed earlier this month, the Crane Boulevard Safety Coalition alleged that the City of Los Angeles failed to preserve internal Google Chats that could have revealed backchannel communications over a contested hillside development in northeast L.A. The group argues the city’s use of auto-deleting messages violates state transparency laws and undermines the public’s ability to hold local officials accountable.
“If they’re conducting our business, it should not be hidden from us,” Mark Kenyon, chair of the Crane Boulevard Safety Coalition (CBSC), said Tuesday. “In the long term, it fosters corruption, and allows good people to do bad things.”
The lawsuit, initially filed in July 2023, centers on a proposed home on a steep hillside in Mount Washington. But during the discovery process, the coalition uncovered that thousands of city staff had, for at least 15 years, used Google Chat set to automatically delete one-on-one and group messages after 24 hours — a practice the group argues shields government communications from public scrutiny.
A policy hidden in plain sight
The disappearing messages were enabled through the city’s Google Workspace suite, which has been used by more than 26,000 employees across 40 departments — including the offices of the mayor, city council, and planning department — since at least 2010, when Google’s collaboration tools were first made available to city staff, the lawsuit alleges.
A July 2020 memo from the Information Technology Agency (ITA), cited in the filing, informed staff that Google Chat was “off-the-record” for direct and group messages, meaning conversations would be automatically deleted after 24 hours.
The agency reaffirmed the policy in a 2022 update, adding that users could not change the setting. “Your conversation is not saved and will automatically delete after 24 hours,” the memo stated, with prompts in the chat box noting, “History is off.”
The city abruptly reversed course on Jan.14, 2025, after a series of wildfires struck the region. In an internal email, ITA said it had enabled Google Chat history citywide “in response to user requests related to the citywide emergency” — meaning messages would now be preserved and “subject to production in legal proceedings, public records requests, and internal investigations.”
Asked about the rationale and scope of the change, ITA Chief Information Officer and General Manager Ted Ross referred questions to the City Attorney’s Office, which declined to comment on pending litigation.
City staff also did not respond to follow-up questions about the current status of the messaging system, possibly due to the ongoing legal challenge.
“An unfair hearing process”
The Crane Boulevard Safety Coalition cites more than just deleted chats. It also alleges that decisions on land-use appeals, such as theirs, were effectively made before public hearings took place, through informal staff communications and private briefings.
They point to “pre-PLUM notes” — internal meeting summaries that Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee staff allegedly prepared in advance of hearings, outlining how council members were expected to vote. In dispositions, city staff acknowledged the existence of pre-hearing meetings where council members’ positions were sometimes shared in advance, Kenyon said.
“This is simply an unfair hearing process to the public,” he added. “It’s basically a kabuki dance where we all go down there and we testify. We get our minute to say whatever we’re going to say, and then the decision is made.”
Former City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who served from 2013 to 2022, said he never personally used Google Chat but knew that some of his staff did, typically for logistical messages like scheduling or checking availability. He said there was little discussion at the time about how emerging digital tools like chat should be governed under public records laws.
“During my time, we went from fax machines to texting, Google chat, Signal, What’s App, and more,” Bonin said in an email Thursday. “And the technology continues to evolve rapidly.”
Bonin, who began working for the city in 1995 as a staffer before being elected to the council, said that when he started, “email and the internet were still fairly new and almost no one had a cellphone (so there was no texting).”
“In all that time, the applicability of CPRA (The California Public Records Act) was extended to cover all these new forms of communication,” he added, “but there was, as far as I can tell, not a lot of thought about it.”
Still, Bonin said he believes internal messages, particularly on sensitive matters like land use, should be preserved and subject to public scrutiny.
“Generally, yes,” he said, “but there needs to be some legislative or regulatory discussion about how to handle and adapt to constantly emerging technologies.”
Asked whether disappearing messages erode public trust or accountability in city government, Bonin said simply: “Yes.”
Experts warn of legal and ethical gaps
David Loy, legal director for the First Amendment Coalition, said L.A. City Hall’s auto-delete setting raises red flags.
“It’s a major transparency concern because transparency is the oxygen of accountability, but we can’t have transparency if they don’t preserve the records,” Loy said Wednesday.
While the California Public Records Act (CPRA) requires agencies to disclose records unless exempt, it doesn’t always mandate which records must be created or how long they must be kept, Loy said. In the absence of clear statewide rules, some local jurisdictions — including City of Los Angeles — set their own standards.
“The City of Los Angeles does have an administrative code that does require a retention of a lot of different kinds of records for up to two years,” Loy said. “I don’t know if that’s being followed here, if that’s an issue.”
Similar concerns have surfaced in a separate case involving the January 2025 wildfires. The Los Angeles Times sued the city in March over the deletion of Mayor Karen Bass’s text messages during the disaster, arguing the messages were public records that should have been preserved under state law.
Beyond the letter of the law, Loy said, the real stakes are public trust.
“People don’t tend to trust what they can’t see,” he said. “ The more transparent the government is, the more likely it is to earn the public’s trust. Because at the end of the day, let’s not forget the government works for the people. The people don’t work for the government.”
Christine Wood, an attorney and partner at Best Best & Krieger who advises government agencies on transparency laws and public records compliance, said the legality of L.A.’s now-disabled 24-hour auto-delete policy depends on more than just the platform used.
“It doesn’t matter the vehicle in which the message is delivered,” she said. “It matters what the substance of the communication is, and whether the communication deals substantively with the people’s business or with the agency’s business.”
But Wood noted that not all public records must be retained — and the Public Records Act (PRA) itself doesn’t specify how long agencies must keep them.
That’s governed by separate laws, such as Government Code 34090, which generally requires agencies to keep records related to the agency’s business, like meeting minutes, ordinances, resolutions, or real property documents, for at least two years.
An agency “could be complying with the PRA, but violating a records retention law. And vice versa,” Wood said.
That becomes especially important, she noted, when agencies rely on platforms with auto-deleting features.
“There is a significant risk because there could be records that they need to retain according to record retention laws,” she said. “And if they are not training staff and directing staff on how to determine if the record needs to be retained, and the record is being automatically deleted, then there’s always a risk that they’re deleting records that they should otherwise be retaining.”
Wood cautioned that record retention decisions are often more complex than the public assumes, and aren’t always the result of intentional secrecy. She said this is part of why aggressive purging policies — like those that delete messages after 24 hours, 30 days, or even 90 days — are generally discouraged. Because the rules around retention are so fact-specific.
“Staff needs to be trained to understand which records they need to keep and which records they don’t need to keep,” she said. “And if that training isn’t intuitive and it’s not second nature to public employees, then there’s sure to be mistakes.”
Both Loy and Wood noted that California law has not kept pace with rapid shifts in workplace communication tools.
The state Legislature once approved a bill (AB 1184) requiring public‑agencies to retain emails for at least two years, but Gavin Newsom vetoed it in 2019 citing concerns about cost and data‑management burdens.
A similar proposal, AB 2370, would have required a two‑year retention minimum for all public records regardless of format, but it too has stalled.
“I would recommend that public agencies at least keep the records a year to show a good faith effort to give the public an opportunity to access the records,” Wood said, “but two years is probably best.”
What’s next?
On Sept. 2, a Superior Court judge denied the coalition’s request to sanction the city or hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether critical Google Chat messages had been improperly deleted. The group had argued that the auto-deletion of internal messages amounted to “spoliation of evidence” — the destruction of information that could be relevant in a legal case.
Now, in an Oct. 8 filing with the Second District Court of Appeal, the coalition is seeking a writ of mandate, a legal mechanism that asks an appellate judge to overturn the ruling and pause the case until the deletion issue is addressed.
The appellate court has not yet decided whether it will take up the coalition’s writ petition. If the case proceeds to trial, it is currently expected to begin in early 2026, though Kenyon said the exact date remains uncertain.
In the meantime, the CBSC hopes its legal challenge will shine light on what it sees as a growing disconnect between public input and actual outcomes at City Hall, and how little the public may ever learn about what happens behind the scenes.
“Really at the heart of it, we’re trying to get the city to stop doing this,” Kenyon said. “We think it’s a very corrosive, potential way for good people to do bad things.”