By hiding a tragic settlement, Sacramento tried to keep an $11 million secret from you

A 72-year-old grandmother was killed and a 6-year-old child suffered catastrophic and permanent brain damage after being struck by a sedan in a Sacramento crosswalk, a tragedy compounded by city officials who seemed intent on keeping it all out of the public eye.

The family of QuiChang Zhu and her grandson Jian Hao Kuang have been devastated by the collision at a crosswalk at Freeport Boulevard and Oregon Drive. It happened in January 2018 at a busy intersection where the city may have removed most of the paint but left imprints, potentially causing confusion.

The City Council discussed the liability of the city behind closed doors in January 2020. An $11 million settlement — one of the largest in city history — was authorized in February 2020. It was provided to a Bee reporter four months later.

The public knows about this only because of reporting by The Sacramento Bee. Without The Bee asking the question, there is a very good chance that this would have never come to light — and it needed to come to light.

There is a very good reason why a free press is essential to push for disclosure of settlements involving public money and the public interest: because governments will try to conceal them otherwise. Governments conceal things every day.

Regardless of their intentions, the silence of Mayor Darrell Steinberg and his eight City Council colleagues amounted to an $11 million secret that they should not have tried to keep. That is what can happen when elected officials confront terrible tragedies in which the governments they represent are liable for millions of dollars.

This has happened before in Sacramento. In 2016, Joseph Mann was gunned down by city police in North Sacramento, and the city manager, city attorney, and police chief at the time conspired to keep audio and video of Mann’s killing out of the public eye. The Bee played a key role in making that video public. One of the officers involved in the shooting was later terminated by the Police Department. The city changed its policy and now makes videos of police shootings public.

The first time that policy was put to the test, former interim Sacramento Police Chief Brian Louie tried to stall and was excoriated by Steinberg and other council members. That blunder ended Louie’s chances of becoming the permanent chief. But Louie never would have been held accountable — he might have become chief, and the city might have never moved toward increased transparency for police shootings — if the horrendous video of the Mann killing was not pried loose from a conspiracy of silence.

The same principle applies to the tragic accident on Freeport Boulevard and the surrounding city conspiracy of silence. Sacramento proved in this case that, left to their own devices, officials will conceal. That’s why the California Legislature needs to force the hands of city officials like those in Sacramento.

Local Assemblyman Kevin McCarty tried to accomplish as much with Assembly Bill 603, which would have required municipalities to post their judgments and settlements involving police conduct on their websites. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed that needed legislation last week. Newsom said he did so because “a vast majority” of the information required in the bill is public record. To which we say, so what?

In the absence of state law, Steinberg and the City Council should make it the city’s policy to publicly announce such settlements going forward or post them online as McCarty’s proposal would have required. Otherwise, we can count on more public records being buried in closed session by officials who, if the decision is left to them, choose not to disclose.

All settlements and judgments involving public money should be reported every time.

The alternative is elected officials keeping secrets kept from the people they were elected to represent.

This story was originally published October 15, 2021 at 5:00 AM.