Blanck v. County of Humboldt

Background

Jeffrey S. Blanck served the County of Humboldt with requests for production, which are discovery requests seeking documents. The court had previously compelled the County to provide additional responses to several of Blanck’s initial requests. This order addressed Request for Production No. 10 after the court requested supplemental briefing.

Request No. 10 sought any Board of Supervisors agenda items from the previous ten years involving a closed session to hear a complaint by one employee against another under California Government Code section 54957.

Ruling

The court ordered the County to respond by producing all finalized agendas it prepared during the previous ten years for regular and special Board of Supervisors meetings when a complaint or charge against a County employee was identified on the agenda and listed as a closed-session item.

For a responsive agenda available on the County’s public website, the County may satisfy the production obligation by identifying the date and time of the related Board meeting and providing Blanck a hyperlink to the agenda or to the webpage from which the agenda can be downloaded.

The court acknowledged that Blanck could obtain publicly available agendas himself. It nevertheless found that the County had not meaningfully disputed Blanck’s assertion that County information-technology staff could locate the responsive agendas more efficiently. The court stated that the County’s relative access to the agendas supported requiring production, citing a decision explaining that documents must be equally available—not merely publicly available—for a responding party to avoid production on that ground.

The court directed the parties to meet and confer, meaning discuss the issue in an effort to reach agreement, about reasonable dates for the County to respond to Request No. 10 and Blanck’s other initial requests for production. The order stated, "IT IS SO ORDERED."