FOR DECADES THE operations of the San Francisco City Attorney's Office have been cloaked in secrecy. Now, in a very positive move, City Attorney Dennis Herrera has announced he'll release most of his office's opinions. On March 1, he posted the first of six recent opinions on the department's Web site (www.ci.sf.ca.us/cityattorney/opinions.htm).

That's a good start. As a next step Herrera should go back through the archives and begin releasing the opinions his predecessors wrote on important public policy issues – and the background documents and communications that support those opinions.

The City Attorney's Office has long had a hand in setting local policy by advising elected officials and city department heads on what they can and can't do. Many of those opinions centered on obscure, perhaps mundane, legal points. Others, though, guided city lawmakers on huge policy issues. And the public has never had the opportunity to understand what that advice was – or how the city attorney reached his or her conclusions.

For example, every city attorney since the 1920s has sided with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and insisted that the city isn't violating the federal Raker Act, which requires San Francisco to operate a public power system. Who pushed that position? How was it decided? Did the city attorney communicate with PG&E? Another example: Renne urged the Board of Supervisors to settle a business-tax case on terms that would have cost the taxpayers millions of dollars. Why?

Not everything in Herrera's office can or should be public. But in the vast majority of instances, once a case that involves the city is closed there is no reason the public should be barred from reading the documents.