Oakland city officials must end their stonewalling over the release of records pertaining to the Ghost Ship warehouse fire.
It’s been more than two months since the tragic inferno that killed 36 people. Despite Mayor Libby Schaaf’s promise of transparency, her administration has failed to release critical public documents.
The mayor and City Attorney Barbara Parker have a choice: They can follow the law or they can become the political symbols of a cover-up of the nation’s deadliest fire since 2003.
And if they choose cover-up, we’ll meet them in court. We served notice with a front-page article on Friday and in a letter from our attorneys the day before. City officials have one week to produce the records we’ve been seeking for two months or we will file a lawsuit to compel them.
We’re tired of waiting. The public deserves answers about what city workers and officials knew about the dangerous conditions inside the warehouse in the years leading up to the fire.
What makes this particularly disturbing is that Schaaf knows – indeed she has publicly acknowledged – that, under the law, the records from before the fire are disclosable public documents.
There should be no hassling over whether they’re confidential. All pre-fire records about the warehouse were public documents then and they remain so today.
It’s past time for the city to produce them, along with the other documents we seek. Yet city officials have ignored our request for records about fire inspections, calls to the Police Department for service and the 911 tapes from the night of the tragedy.
Most of what the public has learned about the months and years leading up to the fire has come from investigative journalism. Records are often the key to that. They’re often the best documentation of who knew what and when.
While Schaaf has promised her own “very thorough and methodical investigation so we can discern what in fact happened,” that’s not a substitute for public access to records.
Especially when Schaaf has hedged her promise by declaring “we will not scapegoat city employees in the wake of this disaster.” No one is looking to unfairly blame workers for the fault of others, but those responsible should be held accountable.
Our job is to hold them accountable, to report on what went wrong and who is responsible. Right now, city officials are blocking that and ignoring the public’s legal right of access.
It’s time for the transparency the mayor promised. Now.
http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/02/04/editorial-oakland-must-turn-over-ghost-ship-records-now/
