The Brown paper mystery
Riffling through the records of our last mayor reveals more questions than answers.

By Matthew Hirsch

FIVE YEARS AGO the Bay Guardian dedicated its 13th annual Freedom of Information issue to crack open former mayor Willie Brown's reign of secrecy. We stated Brown had given away more city money in backroom deals than any other San Francisco mayor since World War II, including the deals for Tele-Communications Inc.-AT&T cable franchise, the 49ers stadium mall, the Presidio privatization, and the Mission Bay development.

Despite San Francisco's landmark Sunshine Ordinance, which declares that city business should conducted for all to see, Brown negotiated each of those agreements without leaving so much as a trace of documentation for the public record.

The following year we wrote about how Brown was already finding ways around a new, stronger version of the Sunshine Ordinance by destroying after 15 days the daily calendars he was required to keep indefinitely and returning contract documents to companies doing business with the city so they couldn't be obtained under sunshine laws.

For eight years we had been asking Brown: Why did he give away so much property for development in Mission Bay, Treasure Island, and Candlestick Point? How did he orchestrate the deal that allowed Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to continue operating the dirty Hunters Point power plant? What was his role in ending the joint-operating agreement between the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner? Brown's office always denied us records that would answer these questions.

Finally, just as Brown was preparing to leave office late last year, we seized on one last opportunity to find out what secrets were being stored in City Hall's Room 200. We asked to inspect his files for all correspondence with key players in the Brown machine: politically connected contractors, lobbyists, campaign consultants, state and federal representatives, and Brown's allies in important city agencies. Surely there would be some documentation of such correspondence.

Ten days later Brown's press secretary, P.J. Johnston, wrote back informing us he had no records for any of the contractors or campaign consultants we inquired about. That included Catellus, Hearst, Lennar, PG&E, and Tudor-Saliba, among others. It also included widely known campaign cohorts such as Jack Davis, Robert McCarthy, James Rubin, and William Rutland.

Johnston offered to let us come review the remaining files we had requested, provided we could pick them out of boxes that had already been packed and were awaiting transport to the San Francisco Public Library, where they would be stored for posterity.

On Jan. 2 we dug through 28 boxes in a City Hall conference room. Not knowing where to begin, we riffled through each box, noting the contents of every file folder inside. Two weeks later, we would continue the process over at the library.

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The 1999 Sunshine Initiative revised San Francisco's open-government law to provide enforcement of the Sunshine Ordinance and close loopholes city officials were using to keep some public records secret. The initiative made all documents in the Mayor's Office and other city departments public property for the first time. This meant that when Brown left office, he couldn't load up his car and take files home with him, as previous departing mayors had done.

The new requirement may have been a bit onerous for Brown, who was rumored to destroy documents from his files on a daily basis. But few people actually believed it would bring to light something Brown didn't want the public to see.

"You may not like his politics, and you may think he is as crooked as the day is old, and a lot of that is true. But whatever you say about that man, he is not stupid," former sunshine task force member Marie Harrison told us. "Anything he does not want you to see, you are not going to see it."

We located Brown's records at the San Francisco History Center in the Main Library, the official city archives. They were delivered in the care of archivist and librarian Tami Suzuki, who is cataloguing all the mayoral papers in the city's possession going back nearly 100 years to James "Sunny Jim" Rolph Jr. In total, Brown's collection consisted of 42 boxes of documents, several of which we would pore through during part of the next five weeks.

We sifted through each of the nine boxes labeled "Mayor's Office," "Chief of Staff Eleanor Johns," or "Legislative Affairs" in close detail. The remaining boxes were significantly less intriguing, containing press files, news clippings, photos of Brown, and notebooks from his monthly Open Door Days.

The nine boxes all contained folders on dozens of interesting subjects – gay and lesbian issues, medical marijuana, even PG&E. Inside them, however, we discovered almost nothing that isn't already available in other offices of city government. Our examination of the Brown papers was as likely to turn up another city agency's annual report as it was anything particularly revealing about San Francisco's 41st mayor.

Of course, each box had at least something worth noting, a glimpse of realpolitik or a once-confidential memo that probably was supposed to have been removed from the record before it was turned over. Together these key documents only amount to a few clues of how Brown ran his administration. He left the city precious little that will be useful to future mayors or the public except a handful of records that illustrate a well-oiled political machine and the man who stood behind it. The following is a sample of what we found most interesting in the Brown papers:

• A letter from John Ritchie of Ritchie Commercial Real Estate suggesting Brown move into the home of Mary Fay Berrigan, who died and had left her estate to the city. The letter was followed by a confidential memo from former city attorney Louise Renne telling Brown the city could lose control of the Berrigan House if he moved in, because Berrigan's will stipulated it be maintained for public enjoyment, not as the mayor's pad.

• A letter from Donald Fisher, owner of the Gap, commending Brown for overseeing new housing construction in the city, particularly the development of Mission Bay – where Fisher planned to build an office building for the Gap.

• A thick file on tenancies in common, including a copy of an e-mail from Jon Bumgarner of the San Francisco Apartment Association urging support for Brown's veto of Sup. Jake McGoldrick's TIC legislation. What was most interesting about the Bumgarner e-mail, addressed to then-supervisor Mark Leno, was it said property owners wouldn't back Leno in his state assembly race against then-supervisor Harry Britt unless Leno voted for Brown's TIC veto. (Leno helped override the Brown veto and still won a seat in the assembly.)

• Evidence that Brown, public enemy number one to open-government advocates, used the Sunshine Ordinance at least once himself. He filed an immediate disclosure request for tapes or records from the San Francisco Election Commission after it fired then-elections chief Tammy Haygood, a Brown ally.

• A letter from Richard Bodisco, then chair of the city's public utilities infrastructure task force, encouraging Brown to fire Ed Smeloff, a San Francisco Public Utilities Commission assistant general manager who was openly speaking in favor of public power during a campaign against PG&E.

• • •

Some people may find Brown's papers useful for one reason or another. Perhaps to see all the thank-you notes constituents sent Brown over the years; there's an entire "Kudos file" for those. Or perhaps to gaze at photos of Brown, in which case there are two full boxes to choose from, including hundreds of the same posed image. On the whole, however, the records are largely disappointing for anybody who expects to find just how Brown carried out the people's business each day or evidence of why he made the decisions he did.

More than two weeks before Brown left office, we sent him a letter through our attorney Thomas Burke requesting confirmation that all original documents would be maintained through his transition from office, as required by the Sunshine Ordinance and the city's records-retention policies. Brown prompted the request by his own comments earlier that week, when he said in the State of the City address he had already begun clearing out the Mayor's Office for his departure.

Except by his word, there is no way of knowing if any of the key documents that may have once been in the Mayor's Office found their way to the shredder or somewhere else instead of the library archive. We can only speculate because nobody independent of Brown was watching as his files were packed in boxes, and upon review the files emerged nearly clean as a whistle.

This examination of the Brown papers makes the case that the next time a mayor leaves office, a representative of the City Attorney's Office should be observing the entire transition. It would be a way to independently verify that all public records are made public, even if an elected official would prefer they remain private. And if ever a mayor preferred to act in private, to avoid public oversight of his most significant policy decisions, it was Mayor Willie Brown.

Research assistance was provided by Helen Christophi and Christy Harrison.

E-mail Matthew Hirsch