Fed. of Eng'Rs, Local 21 v. Superior Court

• Decision Date: 18 April 2005
• Docket Number: No. A108488.,A108488.
• Citation: 128 Cal.App.4th 586,27 Cal.Rptr.3d 262
• Court: California Court of Appeals Court of Appeals
• Parties: INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF PROFESSIONAL AND TECHNICAL ENGINEERS, LOCAL 21, AFL-CIO, et al., Petitioners, v. SUPERIOR COURT of Alameda County, Respondent. Contra Costa Newspapers, Inc, et al., Real Parties in Interest.

27 Cal.Rptr.3d 262

128 Cal.App.4th 586

INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF PROFESSIONAL AND TECHNICAL ENGINEERS, LOCAL 21, AFL-CIO, et al., Petitioners, v. SUPERIOR COURT of Alameda County, Respondent.

Contra Costa Newspapers, Inc, et al., Real Parties in Interest.

No. A108488.

Court of Appeal, First District, Division 3.

April 18, 2005.

Review Granted July 27, 2005.

Duane W. Reno, Davis & Reno, San Francisco, for Petitioner International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 21, AFL-CIO, et al.

Steven T. Mattas, Eric W. Danly, Santa Rose, for Respondent.

Karl Olson, Erica L. Craven, Levy, Ram & Olson, San Francisco, for Real Party in Interest, Contra Costa Newspapers, Inc.

Alison Berry Wilkinson, Rains, Lucia & Wilkinson, for Real Party in Interest, Oakland Police Officers' Association.

PARRILLI, J.

Does the right to privacy in one's personal finances preclude disclosure of the names and salaries of high-earning public employees? We conclude it does not. Once they have received their salaries, public employees enjoy the same rights of financial privacy as other citizens. Payment of public employee salaries, however, is a public expense, and the amounts and recipients of that expense are public records. The people have the right to examine those records to monitor the conduct of public business, unless unusual circumstances justify a different result in a particular case. This is not such a case.

BACKGROUND

Reporters from two newspapers published by Contra Costa Newspapers, Inc. (CCN) petitioned the City of Oakland under the California Public Records Act (the CPRA; Gov.Code, § 6250 et seq.) for records indicating the name, job title, and gross salaries of all city employees who earned at least $100,000 in fiscal year 2003-2004, including those whose base salaries were below $100,000 but who crossed that threshhold when overtime and other compensation were included.

The City refused to identify any individual employees with such earnings. It relied on Government Code section 6254, subdivision (c), which exempts personnel files from disclosures that "would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy"; Government Code section 6254, subdivision (k), a general exemption for legally protected records; Government Code section 6255, which provides a case-by-case exemption when the public interest in nondisclosure outweighs the public interest in disclosure; Penal Code section 832.7, which protects the confidentiality of peace officer personnel records; the state constitutional right to privacy (Cal. Const., art. I, § 1); and two Court of Appeal decisions, Teamsters Local 856 v. Priceless, LLC (2003) 112 Cal.App.4th 1500, 5 Cal.Rptr.3d 847 (Priceless), affirming the grant of a preliminary injunction to prevent the identification of city employees in a release of salary information, and City of Los Angeles v. Superior Court (2003) 111 Cal.App.4th 883, 3 Cal.Rptr.3d 915 (City of Los Angeles), ruling that peace officer payroll records are protected from disclosure under the definition provided in Penal Code section 832.8, subdivision (f).

CCN responded by seeking a writ of mandate under the CPRA. In its petition, CCN claimed the City had historically disclosed salary records and was required to do so by its own "Sunshine Ordinance." It argued the information was "essential to CCN's mission of informing the public about the salaries and qualifications of City employees, issues pertaining to excessive overtime, potential favoritism and nepotism, and issues about whether the City is properly spending tax dollars in an era of lean budgets."

The trial court granted leave to intervene to two public employee unions, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 21 (Local 21) and the Oakland Police Officers Association (OPOA). In its complaint in intervention, Local 21 claimed past newspaper coverage of city employee salaries had included unfair insinuations that the employees were "greedy, undeserving, and overpaid." It contended the Priceless case exemplified a trend in the case law toward recognizing the privacy rights of public employees. The OPOA brief argued the disclosures sought by CCN were "offensive and objectionable" to police officers, and would violate Penal Code section 832.7 as well as the holdings of the Priceless and City of Los Angeles cases.

After hearing argument, the trial court granted CCN's petition. In a written order, the court noted the CPRA placed the burden of establishing an exemption from disclosure on the City and the unions, and exemptions are strictly construed. It ruled that City employees earning over $100,000 had no legally protected privacy interest in their salary information, given the City's well-established past practice of releasing such information. Nor was the court convinced by claims that dissemination of salary information would result in unjustified embarrassment or risk of identity theft. Assuming there were a protected privacy interest in salary information, the court concluded it would be outweighed by the public interest in exposing "inefficiency, favoritism, nepotism, and fraud with respect to the government's use of public funds for employee salaries."

As for the OPOA's claims under Penal Code section 832.7, the court found that police officers' salary information is not within the statutory definition of protected "personnel records." (Pen.Code, § 832.8.) The OPOA relied on the "catchall provision" of Penal Code section 832.8, subdivision (f), which covers "[a]ny ... information the disclosure of which would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." The court rejected this argument for the same reasons it denied the privacy claims of other City employees.

The court concluded: "Clearly, most employees, public or private, would prefer that information about their jobs or earnings not be published in the media. But in Oakland, as in other cities, and indeed, for high-earning government employees generally, there is a long tradition of making such information available to the public, so that citizens can effectively monitor the activities of the government. The Court concludes that the disclosure sought in this case is not an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, and that [the] public interest served by this disclosure outweighs the interests served by nondisclosure."

Local 21 sought a writ of mandate in this court, and requested a stay of the trial court's order. We denied the stay, but because the issue presented by the petition is likely to recur and involves a matter of continuing public interest, we issued an order to show cause and set the matter for argument. OPOA sought to join in and supplement the petition, by way of a motion we have construed as a separate petition. The City has not joined the unions' challenges in this court.

DISCUSSION

We independently review the trial court's ruling, upholding its factual findings if they are based on substantial evidence. (Times Mirror Co. v. Superior Court (1991) 53 Cal.3d 1325, 1336, 283 Cal.Rptr. 893, 813 P.2d 240; Bakersfield City School Dist. v. Superior Court (2004) 118 Cal.App.4th 1041, 1045, 13 Cal.Rptr.3d 517.) The trial court's findings in this case were well supported, its reasoning sound, and its conclusion correct.

We agree with the trial court that CCN's disclosure request implicated no protected privacy interests. The unions do not dispute the court's finding that the City had routinely disclosed the names and salaries of its employees in previous years. This fact supports the conclusion that in Oakland, at least, highly paid public employees had no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their salary information. However, we take a broader view of the privacy issue than the trial court, extending our analysis beyond the local circumstances of CCN's disclosure request. After reviewing the terms and purposes of the CPRA and the sources of privacy rights identified by our Supreme Court (see Part 1, infra), we conclude that well-established norms of California public policy and American public employment exclude public employee names and salaries from the zone of financial privacy protection. We explain this conclusion in Part 2 of our discussion, and consider the counter-arguments raised by Local 21, which pertain to the rights of all public employees.

The unions correctly point out that a different approach was taken in the City of Los Angeles and Priceless decisions, which appear to have motivated the City to alter its past practice.¹ We conclude City of Los Angeles is both distinguishable and unpersuasive. We respectfully disagree with the analysis of the Priceless court. These cases are discussed in Part 3. In Part 4, we consider and reject the contentions of the OPOA, which are confined to peace officers' confidentiality rights under Penal Code section 832.7.

We emphasize the limitations of our holding. We are called upon to consider only the privacy claims of high-earning public employees, and only in regard to the disclosure of names and gross salaries. If there are arguments unique to public employees earning less than $100,000, we have not considered them. Nor should anything in our opinion be read to cast doubt on public employees' right to privacy in the details of their personal finances. Moreover, the lack of a protected privacy interest in their names and salaries does not preclude public employees from seeking to block disclosures on a case-by-case basis under Government Code section 6255, which permits any public record to be withheld from disclosure if "on the facts of the particular case the public interest served by not making the record public clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure of the record."²

1. The CPRA and Privacy Rights

As this court has noted before, the tension between privacy rights and disclosure is inherent and explicit in the CPRA. (City of Richmond v. Superior...