We are sorry to report that there is another troubling development regarding records in CH discovered just today.
Late this afternoon during a phone conversation with the City Recorder Colleen Mulvey, CHCRG researcher and former CH Councilman Ken Cromar learned the public records she is responsible to maintain and protect are stored on a city-owned server, the location of which she claims not to know. She said that she “believes” it might be stored “in the basement or upstairs” of the city building.
Ms. Mulvey’s job as the legal records officer and city recorder is to protect and maintain all city records. How is that possible if she doesn’t even know where the server resides?
We discovered that it’s actually worse than that.
During our most recent January 16, 2015 GRAMA request for ALL communications between Mayor Gary Gygi and the City Council from Sept 5-8, 2014, that Ms. Mulvey wrote to CHCRG that it would cost “at least $70” to fulfill the request. Today Mr. Cromar explained to the Recorder that a city official informed him that reason for the “at least $70” fee was because Mayor Gygi had instructed her to bill CHCRG accordingly because it would take him “at least” 2 hours at $35/hour to review his records to find those four days of communications. She refused to confirm or deny the allegation.
There’s just one little problem with this story: Mayor Gygi was required to have already surrendered those public records “within 30 days” of their creation to the City Recorder, as per city policy.
So, it appears that Mayor Gygi has put himself in the same position as Hillary Clinton in trying to manage and control the public record.
On the national level it has been reported that Rep. Trey Gowdy, the Chairman of the House Committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi will subpoena the ALL the government records which she kept on a private email account, stored on her own private server in her home. She has admitted that ALL of her emails during her four years as Secretary of State under President Obama were done on her personal email account.
This is exactly what happened with then Mayor Eric Richardson who reportedly did ALL of his city business while mayor on his personal email account, prior to his resignation to face bank fraud charges and prison time. This may serve to explain why CHCRG has questioned if it received all records it was legally entitled to. CHCRG knew and declared that it did not receive ALL records requested in 2012, because the city attorney admitted that then Council members Jim Perry, Marisa Wright and Ken Kirk claimed to have innocently allowed city email record kept on their personal email accounts to be “automatically” destroyed after a few weeks by their email service providers.
March 5, 2015, the Politico reported, “…Former Secretary Clinton has left herself in the unique position of being the only one to determine what records the American people are entitled to,” spokesperson Jamal Ware said. “This has significant negative implications for transparency and government oversight, as well as for media and others who have a legitimate interest in understanding the secretary’s time in office.”
“Clinton has come under intense pressure since The New York Times reported Monday that she used a personal email address while at the State Department and that her electronic communication was not preserved on federal servers, a potential violation of the Federal Records Act.” (For complete March 5th Politico story…http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/house-committee-benghazi-clinton-email-subpoena-115795.html )
When Mr. Cromar asked Ms. Mulvey if Mayor Gary Gygi has the ability to access the server and alter or delete his communications, she refused to answer the question.
When asked how she accessed records in order to fulfill a request like ours, her answer was that she asked Mayor Gygi for his password.
“Do you manage and maintain all the city’s records, or not?” Cromar asked. She replied that she did. “Then why do you need to ask Mayor Gygi for his password?” She said she didn’t have to, that she could over-ride his password.
Cromar followed up asking if this meant that Mayor Gygi had the ability to use his password to access, manipulate and/or delete records she supposedly maintained and protected. She again refused to answer the question.
Cromar then asked if she had a back-up master file of all the city records so that no one could access, manipulate or destroy the city records? She provided no reply.
When asked if she could assure that Cedar Hill’s records are preserved and unaltered from their original form, she again said she did not want to answer his question, but that she would get back to him.
This is troubling news in both CH and in DC.
It appears to many CHCRG members and other Cedar Hills residents, that much of the questionable activities taking place on the national level, seem to play out similarly on a micro level here in Cedar Hills.
Hillary Clinton has NO AUTHORITY to control, manipulate and delete any of the public record. Neither does Mayor Gygi, the city recorder, attorney or anyone else in Cedar Hills. Do CH’s & Hillary’s servers need to be seized to preserve the drives and information still embedded on them?
The question that begs to be asked is, “If Mayor Gygi has nothing to hide, then why has he been attempting to control and determine which records are released, and charge for his time on GRAMA record retrieval that are already supposed to be in the hands of the CH city recorder?” Also, “Why has Mayor Gygi told the City Council he intends to avoid documenting his communications with them in writing?”
The City Council now knows of this development, as this article has relayed to them via email.
It now up to the Council to immediately fix this serious breech of protocol and insure that the public record is not accessible to anyone who may want to control, manipulate or delete the record, and to investigate Mayor Gygi and the City Recorder to determine if that has indeed happened already in CH. If the Council does not choose to immediately investigate the Mayor and remedy this ethical and possible legal breech, then they should not surprised if they are considered complicit and part of a possible cover-up.
What was it within his emails that the Mayor may have hoped to hide in the GRAMA request? The emails included damning photographs showing that at least part of Mayor Gygi’s campaign was done from the city building. The photos were altered to lower their quality. When CHCRG protested, the original unaltered photos were provided.
Additionally, an explosive internal email from Councilman Rob Crawley exposing and questioning many alleged self-serving actions by Mayor Gygi.
Yes indeed, if Hillary’s campaign for President doesn’t work out well for her on the national level, she might want to move to Cedar Hills and run for mayor. She would feel very comfortable in CH government. But, warning to Mayor Gygi that he would have a run for his money, as Hillary Clinton most likely has just a little bit more “experience” than he does.
“Run Hillary Run! for Mayor of Cedar Hills — Pt 3” will provide new details as they are discovered in our on-going research. They will be posted here.
Stay tuned to this website.