PART I
San Francisco prides itself on its commitment to openness and transparency in city government.
The crown jewel of that commitment is the Sunshine Ordinance, the local open records law that was passed by city voter referendum in 1999 to require city officials to broadly and quickly disclose public records when requested by the public.
At the time, California had one of the nation’s most pro-disclosure open records laws, but San Francisco’s voters were not satisfied it was tough enough and so they added the Sunshine Ordinance on top of the state law.
The ordinance begins with a manifesto. City departments “exist to conduct the people’s business. The people do not cede to these entities the right to decide what the people should know about the operations of local government.”
The ordinance then declares that the right of the people to know what the city and its officials are doing is “fundamental to democracy” and “with very few exceptions … supersedes any other policy interest” that city officials might use to block access.
But despite these grand pronouncements, an investigation by Bay City News shows that the city’s Department of Technology (DT), the department that administers the system used by many city departments to manage the public’s records requests, favors sunblock over sunshine.
The investigation found that an increasing number of public records requests and their responses are effectively hidden from public view on the website that collects and makes those requests available for the public to search. Thus far in 2025 it appears that the city is on a path that — for the first time — will keep a majority of such requests invisible to the public.
And while BCN was investigating the disturbing trend away from visibility of public records requests, it discovered that on May 1, DT conducted a purge of more than 50,000 prior records requests. BCN estimates that nearly a million documents associated with those requests were also removed from the system at the same time. (DT disagrees with BCN’s estimate of the number of purged documents though it says that it does not know how many documents were purged from the system.)
The notice that DT posted after the purge was completed says the purged requests and documents have been “permanently removed” and “cannot be recovered.” (DT says that while requests and documents are permanently removed from the system, the purged documents belong to, and are maintained by, the original department, subject to that department’s record retention policies. Presumably they could be obtained from the original department if they have been retained and the user makes a new records request.)
Many of the purged requests focused on the humdrum of city life — sidewalk repairs or city contracts or code violations at specific properties — but the purged requests also focused on city corruption. For example, BCN was able to identify dozens of the purged requests that focused on Mohamed Nuru and associates who were at the center of a corruption scandal involving the Department of Public Works.
Some of the purged requests involved the San Francisco Parks Alliance, the financially troubled nonprofit currently subject of civil and criminal investigations undertaken by San Francisco’s City Attorney and District Attorney.
According to Michael Makstman, head of DT and Karen Hong, his chief of staff, this was the first time the department had done a large-scale purge of records from the search portal. They said it was done pursuant to a new “data retention policy” implemented April 1, 2025.
The policy says that its purpose is to “support compliance, security, and proper data governance.” An internal DT email dated March 23 said the policy was based on aligning all users of the system to record retention policies of two of the system’s large users, the Department of Public Works and SFMTA.
Makstman and Hong did not seek or obtain the approval of the mayor or the Board of Supervisors for the policy or the purge. The department also never advised the public — the users of the system — that a massive purge was coming.
The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, the body that has oversight over the city’s compliance with the ordinance, was not consulted by the department on the policy and did not know of the purge until after it was effectuated.
According to DT, the policy and the purge were “system configurations,” “not citywide policies that require approval outside of technical and user department approvals.” DT’s position is that it was free to adopt the new policy and conduct the massive purge of the system on its own, with input only from the departments using the system.
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Public records requests
Requests for city records are filed every day — thousands every year — by members of the public, the press, scholars, activists, and government agencies. The city’s Sunshine Ordinance allows interested people to look at and download the source documents that show how the city and its many departments operate. The records that are made available are an essential tool that lets politicians’ statements be factchecked, city spending quantified, and the success or failure of city projects understood.
The city contracts with CivicPlus of Manhattan, Kansas, an information services company that, among other things, works with governments “to optimize the experience they deliver when interacting with residents,” according to its website. The company says it has more than 10,000 customers serving 340 million community members in the U.S. and Canada.
One of CivicPlus’s products is NextRequest, a software platform for managing a government’s public records requests and responses. A total of 18 San Francisco city departments and agencies, including the ones that that deal with public health, fire, homelessness, and contracting, now use the NextRequest platform.
In 2024, those 18 departments received more than 7,000 records requests and managed them on the NextRequest system.
A key attribute of the NextRequest system is a search feature that allows the public to search prior public records requests.
When a visitor arrives on the landing page on San Francisco’s NextRequest website, he or she is given an opportunity to make a records request, and at the top of the page there is a prominent tab called “Make a Request” to initiate that process.
LEARN MORE: A guide to making a public records request in San Francisco
An equally prominent tab on the landing page is marked “All Requests.” Clicking that tab takes a visitor to a search page where a cheerful instruction prominently advises, “If you need San Francisco records that may have been previously released, please search past requests. You may find what you need!”
When BCN began its investigation in February of 2025, there were nearly 40,000 prior requests that could be searched in the portal going back to 2017. A visitor could not only find prior records requests but could then access all the documents and records released to the prior requester.
The search function unlocks a vast treasure trove of information about the inner workings of the city. It gives the public immediate access to public records that have been provided in the past, bypassing the delays of initiating a new request. (While a records request is supposed to be fulfilled as soon as the agency finds the record and in any event within 10 days, delays and unilateral extensions are common.)
The search function also provides an invaluable way to see when problems or concerns were brought to the attention of the department and how the department responded at the time. For reporters on deadline or members of the public trying to find information rapidly, the collection of prior requests is a powerful and useful research tool.
However, what isn’t apparent from the homepage is that city departments have been given broad authority to determine the “visibility” of any individual request and are able to limit the visibility of any request solely to the requester and department staff. When that happens, neither the prior request nor the documents the city produced in response to the request appear on the search page. For all intents and purposes, they are invisible to the public.
The invisibility of prior records requests is a growing issue. BCN’s analysis shows that the percentage of document requests treated as invisible has risen every year since 2019 and this year is on pace to be more than half of all requests made.
BCN estimates that in addition to the searchable requests, tens of thousands of other requests are on the system but have been made invisible to the public.
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Slathering on the sunblock
From 2002 to 2014, Richard Knee served on the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, the body that oversees the city’s compliance with the ordinance. When Knee was asked about the city’s practice, he said that he had never heard about it. He found it problematic.
In his view, making a public record request “invisible” would amount to a “flagrant violation” of the ordinance. He said unless a public record is specifically exempted from disclosure under the ordinance, “it’s a disclosable public record and it should be listed. It should be visible, absolutely.”
But letting sunshine pour down on the work of city government has never been as popular with city officials as it is with city residents and members of the media. When the Sunshine Ordinance was presented to city voters in 1999, the voter information pamphlet made it abundantly clear that the provisions were opposed by the city leadership at the time (including seven members of the Board of Supervisors).
The Bay Guardian weekly newspaper was quoted in the pamphlet stating that “virtually every public official, commissioner, or city hall bureaucrat went on record as supporting the mayor’s undeclared war on sunshine.”
The amendments’ detractors came up with many reasons for why the voters should reject the proposition — including potential expense and additional paperwork — but city voters were not dissuaded. They voted overwhelmingly — 95,616 to 68,399 — to approve the amendments and give teeth to the city’s existing disclosure law.
Looking back at the language of the amendments 25 years later, there is little doubt that the drafters were motivated by a deep distrust of city leadership and a strong desire to override what the city and its departments did with public information and records. They wanted broad disclosure, not something curated by city departments that could obscure inconvenient or politically sensitive facts.
And if anything expressed that intent it was Sec 67.36 entitled “Sunshine Ordinance Supersedes Other Local Laws.”
That unusual section provided “The provisions of this Sunshine Ordinance supersede other local laws. Whenever a conflict in local law is identified, the requirement which would result in greater or more expedited public access to public information shall apply.”
In other words, under the ordinance, sunshine is the priority.
But for city departments, less so. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force maintains a full docket of complaints that departments withhold information that should be disclosed or delay its production until it is of no use. (BCN’s investigation grew from repeated difficulties in obtaining documents that a city department was required to disclose promptly but did not; the story of its successful challenge to the department’s practice is found here.)
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The Cloak of Invisibility
The NextRequest portal does not prominently advise users that the tab marked “All Requests” does not in fact include all requests. Some veteran users of the system have not known of the practice, and when they searched the portal, they assumed they were searching all prior requests, not just those that city departments decided to make visible.
The website has a FAQ section, but clicking on it brings the user to a page that says “Nothing here yet! Check back soon!”
The tip-off that thousands of prior requests aren’t being disclosed comes from the numbering system. Each request is assigned a year and then a chronological number so the first request of 2025 would be assigned 25-1 and the second 25-2 and so on. Gaps in the numbers shown on the webpage led BCN to ask city officials what the missing numbers represented.
It turns out that when a city department inputs a request and response into the system, it is given the opportunity to choose among different levels of visibility. One is “public,” which means that everyone can see it; others restrict visibility to the requester and the department or department staff. In the absence of a specific choice on visibility by a department’s custodian of records, the visibility the department has chosen as its default setting prevails.
Davares Robinson, the custodian of records and a person handling sunshine compliance for the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), said that he has filled hundreds of data requests directed to the department and when he responds, he follows “standard operating procedure,” which limits the visibility of the request to the requester and the department.
The NextRequest portal would allow Robinson to change the visibility on any particular request to “public” so it could be seen and searched by everybody, but neither Robinson nor anyone else at HSH overrides that setting.
BCN’s analysis shows that all HSH requests — more than 250 from the beginning of 2023 — are invisible to anyone but the requester and HSH.
Robinson said that invisibility is HSH’s default setting “due to privacy concerns” about the personal information of departmental homeless clients.
To evaluate Robinson’s contention that requests are kept invisible because of privacy concerns, BCN looked back at the 12 data requests its reporter lodged with HSH in 2024 and 2025.
None of those requests involved any personal information about HSH clients. For example, several of the requests asked for documents relating to the city’s decision to close the “safe parking” site in Bayview, about spending at the site, and about the multi-million contracts it gave to the nonprofit firms providing services at the site.
While those topics had nothing to do with client privacy, what they had in common was they were looking for information to inform BCN’s reporting on HSH’s mismanagement and financial waste. None of BCN’s requests nor HSH’s responses were made available to the public in the search portal.
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Let the sun pour in
When the Sunshine Ordinance was approved by voters in 1999, it did not explicitly mandate that there be a way to search for prior requests, but according to observers like Knee, once the city created such a function, city departments shouldn’t keep things out of it, at least without a very good reason.
One eight-year veteran of the city’s public record system who identifies himself only by the name “Sullivan” for fear of reprisal, maintains a website called SFneighborhoods.net where visitors can access pages and pages of helpful information about making public records requests in San Francisco.
Sullivan says that Robinson’s privacy explanation is nonsensical.
By the time a public records request has been made and fulfilled, he explains, all personal identifiable information has been redacted from the documents that are produced (that time-intensive process is one of the city’s frequent excuses for delaying its response).
If a document has been disclosed to the original requester, “they’ve already made that information public, so they can’t just make it public for one person and then not for everyone else.”
Knee agrees. If it has been disclosed before, “it’s disclosable.”
Sullivan believes the NextRequest system is not really designed to maximize the availability and transparency of government documents, “it’s actually a way to control how information is given to the public.”
Some of the city departments, Sullivan said, are like fiefdoms, and they don’t welcome public inquiry. He pointed to Mohammed Nuru, the convicted former head of San Francisco’s Public Works Department, as a good example.
“Public records should be open and the more open they are, the less chance that people are going to be able to do stuff,” he said. “Public records imply accountability and that’s why (some departments) want to hide all this.”
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NextRequest encourages visibility
CivicPlus, the creator of the NextRequest system, strongly favors “publishing” records requests — that is, making them visible to the public. In a June 18, 2019, blog post it wrote that publishing can be a “divisive topic, especially with internal staff,” but “benefits of publishing far outweigh the negatives …”
CivicPlus encourages its users to adopt a “proactive publishing mind-set.” It identifies the benefits of that approach as reducing the burden of repeat requests, getting information out to the community faster, and helping departments “save your agency money.”
On the last point it noted that Sacramento, another user of the system, had a records request published in 2016 that was downloaded 239 times in the following three years. “This means the county has reduced up to 239 (duplicate) requests to their agency by having this information publicly available online.”
Overall, it estimates that Sacramento’s pro-publication approach has saved the city “thousands of hours of duplicate work.”
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Task Force is left in the dark
While the practice of selectively publishing records requests is often unknown to users of the system, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force — the body that was created by the ordinance to enforce compliance — is well aware of the practice. They looked at it in their 2022 Annual Report and they did not like what they saw.
They said, “The NextRequest portal purports to simplify and facilitate the process of record request fulfillment. But are simplicity and facility achieved at the cost of transparency?”
They found that “The power to publish requests, keep them hidden … rest(s) solely with the departments specified in the requests. Requesters have little input in this process.”
One of the task force’s responsibilities is to give advice to the city’s Board of Supervisors about the open records process. Its report recommended that all requests on NextRequest should be made publicly viewable by default.
One reason for the recommendation was that “due to the limitations around public visibility of requests, and the SOTF’s limited resources, we could not ascertain details that we would have liked to know.”
Among those things were many of the issues frequently complained about by users of the system, including “denials of requests, delays in responses, (and) incomplete fulfillments of requests.”
The task force said, “While there could be legitimate reasons for unpublished requests, the volume of requests that are obscured from public view renders the viewable/published data tentative.”
In other words, the practice of keeping tens of thousands of requests invisible means that the oversight body — the body created in the voter referendum to let the sunshine pour in on a reluctant city government — is unable to draw firm conclusions on how the sunshine process works.
Laura Stein, vice chair of the task force, confirmed that the task force, like the public, has no access to the invisible items on the NextRequest portal. She said, “we can’t see a dashboard of what the different agencies are doing, and we don’t know.”
She said, “There’s an issue of what NextRequest actually enables people to do, and then what are they doing with it. That is two separate things.”
She said the task force stands behind their recommendation, but “we didn’t hear back from the Board of Supervisors,” and as far as she knows there was no follow up.
According to BCN’s analysis, the only change on the visibility issue in the time since the task force’s recommendation is that even more requests are now being held invisible to the public.
Editor’s note: In Part 2 coming tomorrow, we will look at the Department of Technology’s purge of records in the system.
The post Sunshine and Shadows: Part 1 SF agencies hiding thousands of public records requests appeared first on Local News Matters.