A state appellate court has concluded that the summary of an assessment of senior managers at the North County Transit District should be released for public review.
The decision issued Monday by three justices of the 4th District Court of Appeal was a loss for NCTD, which had argued the entire assessment of 13 top managers was a confidential personnel document. inewsource sued the district in March 2014, contending the full report should be released because the public’s interest in it outweighed privacy issues.
NCTD runs the county’s COASTER, BREEZE, SPRINTER and LIFT transit services, and uses San Diego county’s tax base to support its operations. For the past two years, inewsource has published a series of stories in an ongoing investigation detailing the district’s holes in security, misallocation of funding, questionable contracting, high employee turnover, lawsuits, audits and peer criticism.
inewsource requested the management assessment under the California Public Records Act after a source tipped off a reporter to its existence. The source claimed the report validated criticisms of leadership deficiencies at NCTD detailed in previous inewsource reporting.
inewsource executive director Lorie Hearn cast the decision as a victory for taxpayers.
“We are gratified that the court agreed that the public should be allowed to see at least part of the leadership assessment. It is important that the North County Transit District, which serves millions of riders each year, is held accountable to the taxpayers,” Hearn said.
NCTD paid UCSD’s Rady School of Management $31,200 to conduct a “Leadership Assessment Program” of its managers in 2014. The resulting report detailed strengths and weaknesses of each manager.
In its unanimous ruling, the three appellate justices determined that the entire report, including the talent management summary, fell under the description of “personnel or similar files.” The court agreed with NCTD that the individual assessments should not be released because they are personnel evaluations. However, it said that unlike the individual evaluations, the summary did not present “danger of embarrassment or pain to individual employees” because the information contained within it could not be tied to any individual employee.
Noting that the assessment was performed with public funds, the opinion, written by Justice Gilbert Nares, said the public “has an interest in knowing what was purchased with those funds, whether the Program was worth what the District spent, and whether the Program provided utility to the District…
“The public also has an interest in knowing how the District identifies professional development opportunities and evaluates its senior staff, which were in part purposes of the Program. The Rady documents would plainly shed light on the District’s activities in these ways.”
The court said, “The Rady documents also shed light on the District’s ability to perform its primary duty: developing and operating mass transit systems in San Diego County.”
Click here to read the judge’s ruling.
The court of appeal decision overturns a ruling by Superior Court Judge Joan M. Lewis, who contended the documents should not be made public because they were “personnel, medical, or similar files” and that “…the records would not contribute to the public’s understanding of government…”
During oral argument on April 12, the appellate justices foreshadowed their ruling.
At several points Justice Nares said he didn’t see a problem with making the assessment summary–the section without names–public. He acknowledged that subordinates would speculate about which manager received which rating, “but it will be only speculation.”
NCTD lawyer Steven Boehmer contended that releasing any part of the evaluation “will have a chilling effect” on NCTD and other public agencies who evaluate their managers and tell them the results will be confidential.
Justice James McIntyre said at the hearing that he thought releasing the documents would be of some benefit to the public.
“If you need improvement in this many categories,” he said, looking at the study’s results, “you must not be a top rate or even a medium rate organization.”
And if you disagree, he suggested, “I don’t know what planet you’re on.”
Commenting on the decision Monday, attorney Guylyn Cummins, who represented inewsource, said, “We believe these battles are important to fight because the management team at NCTD has made some management decisions that have cost the taxpayers a lot of money.”
The North County Transit District and attorney Boehmer did not return calls seeking comment on the ruling and whether the agency intended to appeal it.
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inewsource is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom dedicated to improving lives in the San Diego region and beyond through impactful, data-based investigative and accountability journalism.
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Below is a breakdown of staffing data at inewsource. We determine the composition of our staff by asking them to self-identify. It is based on a newsroom of 11 and a total staff of 15 as of August 2020. Percentages are based on 15 total survey responses. The numbers include full-time and part-time staff, full-time fellows and full-time and part-time interns.
| All Staff Percentages are based on 15 total survey responses. The numbers include full-time and part-time staff, full-time fellows and full-time and part-time interns. | Newsroom Percentages are based on 15 completed survey responses to this question. | Business Percentages are based on 15 completed survey responses to this question. | |||
| Gender Identity | Gender Identity | Gender Identity | |||
| Women | 80% | Women | 82% | Women | 75% |
| Men | 20% | Men | 18% | Men | 25% |
| Sexual Orientation | Sexual Orientation | Sexual Orientation | |||
| Straight | 87% | Straight | 82% | Straight | 100% |
| LGBTQ-identifying | 7% | LGBTQ-identifying | 7% | ||
| Not specified | 7% | Not specified | 7% | ||
| Speak a language beyond English at home | 33% | Speak a language beyond English at home | 18% | Speak a language beyond English at home | 75% |
| Race/Ethnicity | Race/Ethnicity | Race/Ethnicity | |||
| White | 67% | White | 73% | White | 50% |
| Hispanic or Latinx | 20% | Two or more races | 18% | Hispanic or Latinx | 50% |
| Two or more races | 13% | Hispanic or Latinx | 9% | ||
| Age | Age | Age | |||
| 20-29 | 40% | 20-29 | 45% | 20-29 | 25% |
| 30-39 | 47% | 30-39 | 45% | 30-39 | 50% |
| 60 or older | 13% | 60 or older | 9% | 60 or older | 25% |
* The percentages in the charts have been rounded and may not add up to 100.
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inewsource is a nonprofit organization, whose legal name is Investigative Newsource. It does business as inewsource. The business was incorporated on Aug. 4, 2009 in the state of California. Tax-exempt status as a 501c3 was granted by the IRS on Sept. 15, 2010. inewsource is funded primarily by individual contributions and foundation grants. We are guided by a board of directors.
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Transparency is one of our core values. Today, there is a need to build trust with our audience because new media and ways of communicating spread lies and slanted news faster than “real” news. At the same time, this era of new technologies makes it easier than ever for news organizations to be transparent. People don’t just have to believe us, they can investigate our investigations with our source materials.
Transparency is key to building credibility.
inewsource reporters have primary responsibility for reporting, writing, and fact-checking their stories. But before a story is published, the reporter reviews all facts and sources with an editor or another reporter. Facts must be traced to a primary source.
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CEO, Editor and Founder: Lorie Hearn, loriehearn@inewsource.org
Lorie Hearn is the chief executive officer, editor and founder of inewsource. She founded inewsource in the summer of 2009, following a successful reporting and editing career in newspapers. She retired from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she had been a reporter, Metro Editor and finally the senior editor for Metro and Watchdog Journalism. In addition to department oversight, Hearn personally managed a four-person watchdog team, composed of two data specialists and two investigative reporters. Hearn was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University in 1994-95. She focused on juvenile justice and drug control policy, a natural course to follow her years as a courts and legal affairs reporter at the San Diego Union and then the Union-Tribune.
Hearn became Metro Editor in 1999 and oversaw regional and city news coverage, which included the city of San Diego’s financial debacle and near bankruptcy. Reporters and editors on Metro during her tenure were part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham and led to his imprisonment.
Hearn began her journalism career as a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, a small daily outside of Philadelphia, shortly after graduating from the University of Delaware. During the decades following, she moved through countless beats at five newspapers on both coasts.
High-profile coverage included the historic state Supreme Court election in 1986, when three sitting justices were ousted from the bench, and the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. That gas chamber execution was the first time the death penalty was carried out in California in 25 years.
In her nine years as Metro Editor at the Union-Tribune, Hearn made watchdog reporting a priority. Her reporters produced award-winning investigations covering large and small local governments. The depth and breadth of their public service work was most evident in coverage of the wildfires of 2003 and then 2007, when more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes.
Managing Editor: Mark J. Rochester, markrochester@inewsource.org
Mark J. Rochester began as inewsource managing editor in April 2021, having served as editor in chief at Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Manhattan. He was previously senior news director for investigations at the Detroit Free Press. Both newsrooms, he notes, shared a commitment to diversity and inclusion, and their investigative journalism often received national recognition for exposing problems impacting communities of color.
His family looks forward to returning to California, having spent more than seven years in San Francisco where Rochester was a senior manager for the Associated Press. While with the news cooperative, he led computer-assisted reporting training efforts around the West, both inside and outside of AP, and conducted a widely used analysis of the $74 million in campaign contributions that went toward the California gay marriage ballot initiative in 2008. The AP analyzed who gave and why and then made the data available to member newspapers. The resulting series of stories based on the data was AP’s 2009 Pulitzer nomination for Local Reporting.
Rochester, who served as a Pulitzer Prize jurist in 2017, also has held senior leadership positions at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Denver Post, Newsday and The Indianapolis Star. Rochester is vice president of Investigative Reporters & Editors Inc., the 6,000+ member international organization dedicated to improving investigative journalism. He also serves on the national advisory board of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University in Washington, D.C.
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Congratulations inewsource team! Way 2 go!
A victory? Hardly. The inewsource petition covered the entire results of a, “Leadership Assessment Program.” The court agreed to allow inewsource to receive the “talent management summary” on page two of the presumably voluminous documents and denied inewsource’s petition “in all other respects.” The court also denied inewsource’s request for attorneys fees.
In my view it is not in the best interests of the public that this sort of review be made public. However dysfunctional inewsource or others may consider this organization to be, the organization was proactive enough to conduct a candid internal review of its administrative staff in an apparent effort to address deficiencies and make improvements. To be effective, these sorts of reviews depend upon confidentiality so that internal respondents feel safe to be candid. Indeed, as noted in the court ruling, the human resources director told the respondents the results would be confidential. It reflects well upon the organization, in my view, that they were willing and interested to undertake this effort and this is the sort of effort to improve that should be encouraged. Disclosure creates a chilling effect on self-improvement efforts.
Oh. Blah. You must be one of those reviewed. Or very close to one to empathize so completely with upper dysfunctional management at NCTD.
Whoa Nelly: (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) You are completely incorrect. I have no connection with NCTD, nor do I have an opinion about them. I do not empathize with them. I believe that good and bad organizations can benefit by self-assessment and actions like this discourage same.
I knew people who worked at NCTD. It was a culture of bullying and harassment. One could only characterize the place as a hostile work environment. When my friends worked there Dave Roberts was on the NCTD Board along with Bill Horn both now county commissioners. Women were berated and older women and males we constantly picked on.
People with perfect annual appraisals were let go if they stood up for those being attacked.
The board and CEO had a policy to get rid of anyone with Calpers pension contribution by the agency.
A smart lawyer would meet with and seek out ex employees and file a class action against the board, CEO and agency for a Rico based approach to end Calpers funded pensions at NCTD.
I doubt they would loose and the attorney would make a boatload of money.
The board is very corrupt and NCTD should be combined into Sandag to save the taxpayers money.