Sacramento Bee’s lawyers demand Sac State release full CapRadio audit, condemning ‘secrecy’
Attorneys on behalf of The Sacramento Bee sent a letter Thursday to Sacramento State demanding the university release an unredacted version of an audit the university published in August that scrutinized Capital Public Radio’s finances, centering largely on unexplained expenditures by a former general manager at the station.
Sacramento State commissioned a forensic examination from accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen last year after a separate audit by the California State University system exposed wide financial mismanagement at the beleaguered station, an auxiliary of the university.
The Roseville-based accounting firm, in a summary of the audit released Aug. 5, found hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on a credit card in the name of former general manager and executive vice president Jun Reina, for which the auditors could not find corroborating receipts.
But Reina’s name, along with those of all others described in the audit, was redacted in the version posted publicly on the Sacramento State website. Documents appended as attachments — such as emails and invoices — were also removed from public view.
The removal of that information is improper and concerning, an attorney for The Bee and a First Amendment expert both said, because it obfuscates financial transactions and other processes undertaken by a public university and one of its auxiliaries.
The Bee filed a California Public Records Act request in early August to Sacramento State, seeking the identities of board members identified as some of the 35 people or businesses involved in the audit and attachments withheld from the examination.
That records request was denied.
The Bee later received a response, from a separate records request made to CapRadio, containing board committee meeting minutes, signed purchase orders and other documents that confirmed Reina’s identity, which had first been reported by CapRadio journalists the week after the audit’s release.
But Sacramento State has not provided the full, unredacted audit, after The Bee filed separate records requests to both entities.
Described in the redacted audit are CapRadio employees, board members, witnesses, businesses and more whose identities are erased in the version of the examination published online. The identities of each board member and the businesses associated with each of them have been reported by The Bee.
Throughout the 36-page document, auditors also referred to several attachments such as credit card statements outlining Reina’s expenses and emails of board members that may have drawn contracts with CapRadio for their own businesses, despite having a conflict of interest or possible conflict of interest.
Auditors could not find documentation supporting $768,325.34 of CapRadio’s money. In addition, a “total of $460,831.93 in unsupported payments were either directly disbursed to (Reina), or (Reina) made purchases via credit card that were subsequently paid by CPR without corresponding evidence of expense reports and/or receipts,” the audit said.
“We can’t let Sac State and CapRadio conceal the details of a scandal that has cost the public a great deal of money and certainly undermined faith in CapRadio and Sac State,” The Bee’s attorney Karl Olson said.
‘A right to know’
Sacramento State invoked two major reasons to deny The Bee’s request: a right to privacy and an investigation conducted by law enforcement unaffiliated with the university.
First, Sacramento State’s records access officer Cheri Acton decided a Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office investigation involving CapRadio precluded the university from disclosure. The California Public Records Acts carves out exemptions an agency may wield to deny disclosure.
“The public interest in matters pertaining to the management, operations and transactions of an auxiliary organization, while strong, is clearly outweighed by the greater public interest in preserving the integrity of ongoing law enforcement investigation and privacy interests,” Acton’s denial to The Bee read, in part.
In The Bee’s letter, Olson wrote it’s not clear that disclosing documents would impact the investigation at all. Some names have already been made public in Bee stories or are records maintained by the people central to the audit, Olson wrote.
“The public interest in secrecy asserted by Sacramento State, on the other hand, is generalized, speculative, and insufficient to justify (nondisclosure),” Olson wrote.
University President Luke Wood was the first to disclose the Sheriff’s Office investigation, doing so in a letter to campus that said “some information” had been redacted in the audit “to avoid jeopardizing a related investigation by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.”
Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Amar Gandhi previously said deputies are investigating “financial improprieties” at CapRadio.
The existence of a law enforcement investigation is not a reason to withhold the agency’s own public records, especially if the audit was commissioned of its own accord and not as part of the investigation, said David Loy, the legal director of the First Amendment Coalition. By invoking this reason, an agency could then always refuse to disclose internal records any time that law enforcement decides to investigate, he said.
“The public has a compelling interest in assessing whether and to what extent a public agency misused taxpayer money,” Loy said.
Loy added that the documents withheld in the audit are within the paradigm of records required to be loosened under the Public Records Act.
“The mere fact that law enforcement may be investigating something that a public agency did, in my view, should not be an excuse to invoke the catch all exemption over the agency’s own internal records,” Loy said.
Second, Acton invoked in part “the individual right of privacy under Article 1, Section 1 of the California Constitution” in response to a request to learn the names of university and radio station employees, as well as vendors who inked contracts with CapRadio.
“Records that are subject to investigations where the process has not fully concluded are exempt from disclosure as the potential harm to privacy interests and interference with an ongoing investigation outweighs the public interest in disclosure,” the denial said.
Generally, the public does not have a right to know every single person who contacts an agency. Privacy is a sliding scale, Loy said.
But if disclosure allows the public to learn how an agency operates, illuminating a decision made by the entity, then the names have to be released, Loy said. Names allow the public to determine any allegations or ethical concerns, he said.
“People have a right to know who are getting taxpayers’ dollars,” Loy said.
This story was originally published December 13, 2024 at 2:18 PM.
