The Observation Deck

All –

It’s loud and clear that most if not everyone here will never be persuaded to support the decision to allow the Lakewood Hospital Association to terminate the 1996 Definitive Agreement. I get it. I hear you. I didn’t want the hospital closed either. I posted at length in a dozen or so threads last year about how I came to my decision (service lines being removed from Lakewood Hospital for close to a decade prior to City Council's work leaving two out of every three beds empty on any given night, the Cleveland Clinic’s operating contract with the Lakewood Hospital Association and not directly with the City, a facility that needed close to $90M in repairs and upgrades, the Clinic not required to allow or pay for repairs or upgrades over a certain amount, a new $34M Family Health Center with a 24/7/365 ER that will serve Lakewood residents, the proper disposition of all LHA assets, findings in the Huron Consulting report regarding the lack of alternative providers and financial projections, Thompson Hine's opinion regarding the City's position in respect to the agreement between LHA and the Clinic, etc.).

I am not attempting to change people’s minds on the hospital matter or on the public records request issue. I am just trying to provide an alternative to the “they’re all criminals” narrative. As I have written before, I understand that the City has responded to all the public records requests. Some requests, however, like the one for all the Mayor’s emails from 1/1/2011 to 3/15/2016, are very ambiguous and those who made the request have refused to narrow the search to specific words or phrases. (Without a more specific request, the City would have to review more than 130,000 emails then produce each in the way the Court requires.) Some have been denied due to privilege/confidentiality with other entities. Others have resulted in thousands of pages of provided documents.

I believe any city has a duty to provide all responsive records to a request. If the request is believed to be overly broad, any city is obligated to help focus the request and not simply deny it.

The bottom line is that a completely objective third party, the Court, via mediation and review, will make the final determination regarding document requests denied due to privilege/confidentiality with other parties or ambiguity. I understand mediation sessions were scheduled for the prior work week.

David W. Anderson
Member of Council, Ward 1

Courts have already decided that Mr. Butler has to release. Therefore, mediation is not appropriate. What is appropriate is handing over the requested emails.

What is appropriate is to have transparency in our city government. Coverups are never acceptable. Perhaps our City government thinks this is too difficult to manage, but it is chilling. The Watergate break-in was a stupid dirty trick. It was the coverups that brought down a President.

Sunshine laws are meaningful and in this process, the failure of our elected officials and their employees to behave in an above-board and ethical manner, is completely unacceptable.

David Anderson wrote:All –

It’s loud and clear that most if not everyone here will never be persuaded to support the decision to allow the Lakewood Hospital Association to terminate the 1996 Definitive Agreement. I get it. I hear you. I didn’t want the hospital closed either. I posted at length in a dozen or so threads last year about how I came to my decision (service lines being removed from Lakewood Hospital for close to a decade prior to City Council's work leaving two out of every three beds empty on any given night, the Cleveland Clinic’s operating contract with the Lakewood Hospital Association and not directly with the City, a facility that needed close to $90M in repairs and upgrades, the Clinic not required to allow or pay for repairs or upgrades over a certain amount, a new $34M Family Health Center with a 24/7/365 ER that will serve Lakewood residents, the proper disposition of all LHA assets, findings in the Huron Consulting report regarding the lack of alternative providers and financial projections, Thompson Hine's opinion regarding the City's position in respect to the agreement between LHA and the Clinic, etc.).

I am not attempting to change people’s minds on the hospital matter or on the public records request issue. I am just trying to provide an alternative to the “they’re all criminals” narrative. As I have written before, I understand that the City has responded to all the public records requests. Some requests, however, like the one for all the Mayor’s emails from 1/1/2011 to 3/15/2016, are very ambiguous and those who made the request have refused to narrow the search to specific words or phrases. (Without a more specific request, the City would have to review more than 130,000 emails then produce each in the way the Court requires.) Some have been denied due to privilege/confidentiality with other entities. Others have resulted in thousands of pages of provided documents.

I believe any city has a duty to provide all responsive records to a request. If the request is believed to be overly broad, any city is obligated to help focus the request and not simply deny it.

The bottom line is that a completely objective third party, the Court, via mediation and review, will make the final determination regarding document requests denied due to privilege/confidentiality with other parties or ambiguity. I understand mediation sessions were scheduled for the prior work week.

David W. Anderson
Member of Council, Ward 1

David

First, a terrible characterization of the Deck, and the people in this thread.

This thread isn't about the terrible decision to liquidate Lakewood's biggest asset, doorway to Northern Ohio's hottest business health care. It is about the decisions and the facts that lead to this decision. If someone was to be cynical, they would see the move to make LHA a private foundation, was a move to get around sunshine laws. Look at where we are at now. Not just sunshine law violations, but violations in public record requests.

Some pretty outrageous claims were said here over the past two years. The only thing that proves what is going on are the facts, and the paperwork, Why is it so terrible that residents what to look over public documents? How does that become evil?

David, you have worked at non-profits, and now work for the county I believe, at what point was anything you do on their computers not a public document?

Why are simple things like computer usage, not related to the hospital, not a public record?

David, you know my record requests have NOTHING TO DO WITH THE HOSPITAL, but have to do WITH PUBLIC SAFETY. Why are they ignored?

Finally, why don't you enlighten some to the facts you have seen? Maybe that would clear thing up?

David, I also fear like you, we end up with nothing or less. Well buddy, we are there, and we have a right to know why.

Look at the community board for the new building. ALL WITH SERIOUS TIES TO THE COUNTY OR THIS NIGHTMARE.

David, be the councilman that brings the city together. Be the one that seeks the truth for the residents.

.

David, be the councilman that brings the city together. Be the one that seeks the truth for the residents.

That would take courage. I haven't seen Anderson exhibit that before so why now?

What we need are new people on council.

We need a city government that respects the citizens and promotes open, honest transparent leadership.

It's what we deserve.

Jim O'Bryan wrote:This thread isn't about the terrible decision to liquidate Lakewood's biggest asset […] It is about the decisions and the facts that lead to this decision.

I appreciate tremendously that most people have kept this in mind.

For that reason I only want to raise one point about Councilman Anderson's recitation of "how I came to my decision."

The claims which he lists were already being made before November 2015. In most cases, long before that. The majority are no different from the claims promoted all the way back on January 15, 2015.

Why didn't Councilman Anderson, who was running for re-election in 2015, inform the residents of Ward 1 about his interpretation of these claims? If, at least in his judgment, they validated a "decision to allow the Lakewood Hospital Association to terminate the 1996 Definitive Agreement" on December 21, 2015, then they also did so before November 3.

So why didn't he give notice of his conclusion to this effect?

That's also a transparency question, and a very simple one, which should not require any consultation by or with our respected friends in the legal profession.

One point in response to Mr. Anderson's most recent post:

It is my understanding that a lengthy mediation was held previously and that the City of Lakewood did not materially produce documents or privilege logs as a result of that mediation. Hence, Mr. Essi continued his recourse with the Court to achieve the release of the Public Records that he has sought.

The mediation that Mr. Anderson describes is a second mediation. Over the next few weeks, we can all witness whether the City again uses another mediation to impose further delay in its compliance with the statute. If I were Mr. Essi, my expectations would be low given the experience of the first mediation.

The City of Lakewood has a duty to comply with the state statutes. The City's continued efforts to delay the production of these records is designed to impede Mr. Essi's exercise of his First Amendment rights to report on the activities of local government.

In the interest of accountability, ethics, transparency and the simple obedience to Ohio law, the withheld public records should be released forthwith.

One point in response to Mr. Anderson's most recent post:

It is my understanding that a lengthy mediation was held previously and that the City of Lakewood did not materially produce documents or privilege logs as a result of that mediation. Hence, Mr. Essi continued his recourse with the Court to achieve the release of the Public Records that he has sought.

The mediation that Mr. Anderson describes is a second mediation. Over the next few weeks, we can all witness whether the City again uses another mediation to impose further delay in its compliance with the statute. If I were Mr. Essi, my expectations would be low given the experience of the first mediation.

The City of Lakewood has a duty to comply with the state statutes. The City's continued efforts to delay the production of these records is designed to impede Mr. Essi's exercise of his First Amendment rights to report on the activities of local government.

In the interest of accountability, ethics, transparency and the simple obedience to Ohio law, the withheld public records should be released forthwith.

The longer this stonewalling continues, and the harder they fight it, are clear indicators that there are some things THEY DO NOT WANT US TO SEE.

There is an easy metric for Mr. Anderson to use to establish for himself whether or not the City of Lakewood is acting in good faith or is stonewalling on Mr. Essi's requests for public records.

Many of these records requests are more than a year old now. The metric I propose is simple.

Has the City of Lakewood or its legal counsel defending the non-disclosure of public records interviewed or retained a third-party vendor to handle the electronic document review?

If not, we can conclude that the City has not made a good-faith effort to review its own records to see whether or not they actually are exempt from production under the public records laws.

To quote Mr. Anderson, " I am just trying to provide an alternative to the “they’re all criminals” narrative."

The best way to demonstrate this alternative is for the City of Lakewood to promptly have an independent third-party consultant conduct a technologically competent review of the public records that Mr. Essi seeks and then promptly produce all non-exempt public records.

As I have noted earlier, there is nothing hard about any of this. Lawyers in Northeast Ohio do this everyday of the week. It is now standard practice and well-understood by the Court and the Bar.

Here is how it is done:

The independent third-party consultant collects the specified electronic files. Once those files have been collected, the consultant uses various software tools to find and eliminate duplicate copies of the data. This is known as "de-duping". Then using a set of agreed-to search terms, those search terms are run against the remaining "de-duped" documents. These documents are then searched by attorney names to determine a sub-set of documents that might be protected by the attorney-client privilege. A log of potentially exempt attorney-client documents is generated for further review. Lawyers parse millions of pages of electronic mail and electronic documents with these kinds of processes. There is an entire industry built around this process of e-discovery consultants.

Given that the City of Lakewood has not retained a third-party consultant to conduct a technologically competent document review, it makes no sense for Mr. Essi or his legal counsel to provide their proposed search terms at this time.

As we read Mr. Anderson's posts in this thread, we can draw some reasonable conclusions that:

1. The City has not retained a third-party vendor to do a technologically competent search of the City's electronic public records, because he is complaining of the burden of producing the Mayor's email and would not be doing so if the City had already parsed them effectively, and;

2. Because we are at least a year into the public records requests and because the City has not parsed the electronic public records, we can safely infer that the City continues to stonewall Mr. Essi on his requests.

And we can infer that the continued refusal to produce documents is an indication that those documents are compromising.

It's not rocket science. Failure to comply with requests and court orders only means one thing.

They are hiding compromising documents.

Councilman Anderson,

You chose public office. That requires representation of your constituents, not the corporation. It also requires great courage.

Brian Essi, Marguerite Harkness, Dr. Kilroy, Ed Graham, Tom Monahan and many other extremely knowledgeable and esteemed individuals attempted to warn you of the dangers of your decision to support closing the hospital. You and the other members of the previous council ignored them.

It is unfortunate. You bore great responsibility in making that detrimental decision. Although Jimmy Dimora was a friend of my family, I never felt sorry for him. He abused a position of power and forever tainted the Democratic Party. In the end, he was accountable for his choices. Clearly, the previous council and the associated city leadership will be accountable too.

Please don't continue to justify your wrongdoings. While I appreciate your input on the deck, I don't appreciate the weak justification for hiding the documents. Read the excellent advice from Mark Kindt above. Own up this wrongdoing and set it straight.

Respectfully,
T Peppard

Tara,

In discussing the lawsuit I am part of against the City and the CCF, I told the Mayor I was extremely concerned about the ethical and legal situation that was coming to light. I mentioned to him that it was unethical, for instance, to have a City official serving on one LH board and a family member serving on another. He couldn't understand it and disagreed with me and asked how it could be unethical. He asked me, "What's the gain?" I told him it didn't matter if there was no obvious gain, that these days such things are considered unethical. We all know that the Mayor didn't do any training in ethics and that the Law Director took the training for all of the Council members and either told them about the class or shared his notes. I personally believe that the dog ate his notes, but that's my opinion.

I mentioned that even Jimmy Dimora didn't know he was Jimmy Dimora. The Mayor was shocked and asked me if I thought he was like Jimmy Dimora. I said I didn't know.

Now that I know what I know, I believe Jimmy Dimora is an angel compared with the Mayor, the Law Director, and every Council member.

JMO, folks, but I've been part of discovery for a long time.

DL and Bill (co defendants)--bet you never thought you would be addressed that way!

My class --- LHS 67 which many have considered to the best class ever is anticipating our 50th Reunion this August. You know, we're all essentially from the same family of time, experiences, and expectations.

I just can't help but reflect and present the question of what went askew?

Stan Austin