An Anchorage judge on Tuesday ordered the city to search its records and turn over to a union coalition any emails, letters or other documents to or from Anchorage mayoral candidate Dan Coffey concerning the city's divisive 2013 labor ordinance that removed the right to strike for municipal employees and limited annual pay increases.
The order, by Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi, came in a public records lawsuit brought March 17 by a coalition of municipal unions against the city seeking to unravel how the labor ordinance, AO 37, came to be written and passed. The city turned over thousands of pages of documents before the lawsuit was filed, but the union plaintiffs say the material is largely irrelevant to their quest. They are pressing for the full release of the documents by the April 7 mayoral election.
Guidi told the city to turn over any relevant documents on Coffey by April 1. The period covered is Jan. 1, 2013, to April 1, 2013, when the labor ordinance was being developed.
Coffey has served as a consultant to Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan, but the unions say he has denied any involvement in the ordinance, according to Mike Stumbaugh, the president of the city firefighters union. Coffey didn't return a call seeking comment Tuesday.
Guidi gave the city until June 15 to turn over records on all other officials.
Citing the June 15 deadline, Stumbaugh said he was disappointed by the judge's decision.
"This doesn't do much for us," he said, adding that he didn't understand why Guidi's decision was so focused on Coffey. "We're not just out for a witch hunt, we're trying to get to the bottom of how the whole thing happened," Stumbaugh said.
The union coalition filed the lawsuit after their direct public records request to the city, made in September and seeking a broad range of documents, remained mostly unfulfilled. The unions hoped to have the records in hand by last November's election, when a referendum on the labor ordinance was on the ballot. Voters rejected the ordinance anyway. Now the unions want the material to help their members and the public evaluate candidates for mayor. One of the candidates, Assemblywoman Amy Demboski, voted for the ordinance.
A motion for a temporary restraining order filed last week in Anchorage Superior Court sought to force the city to fulfill the September records request. The motion sought records "relating to the drafting, consideration, costs and adoption" of AO 37 -- far more than just any possible involvement by Coffey.
Union leaders say they want to know who was involved in drafting AO 37, a process they said was deeply secretive. But in October, attorneys for the city said the request was too broad to be fulfilled in the time sought by the unions, documents filed with the lawsuit show.
The lawsuit accused the city of dragging its feet on providing the public records. The suit said the labor ordinance and how it was created remains an "important issue" for voters.
"The requested records will provide important information about the attitudes of candidates for the office of mayor, about municipal employees, their rights to collective bargaining, the unions who represent municipal employees and other related matters," Stacey Stone, an attorney for the union coalition, wrote in a motion seeking the injunction.
The motion specifically mentioned Demboski and Coffey.
"Other candidates for mayor may have commented at public hearings, sent letters or e-mails or other communications to the mayor or assembly," Stone wrote.
But Guidi's order was much narrower, focused solely on "all letters, emails and memoranda concerning AO-37 that were exchanged between Dan Coffey and municipal employees or officials" in the lead-up to the Assembly vote on the ordinance. "The results of this inquiry will be given to the (union) plaintiffs by April 1, 2015," Guidi wrote.
Guidi wrote that Demboski's position is already a matter of public record.
The city has released more than 7,500 documents since the initial request was filed, but another huge trove of documents, measuring 4 gigabytes on a hard drive, still needs to be sifted through, municipal attorney Todd Sherwood said in a hearing Tuesday morning.
In a letter dated Oct. 21, Sherwood and municipal attorney Dennis Wheeler said the request was "massive … the size of which has rarely if ever been seen by the Municipality." They said the request will cost the unions about $24,000. Sherwood also told Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi that the city is acting in good faith, including releasing documents on a rolling basis.
The unions say, however, that the documents produced so far are not relevant to the request. Stumbaugh called the batch "junk," and said Assembly members' communications are among the documents that have still not been provided.
Guidi, in his order, said the city can revise its fees for searching and processing the records. If the unions don't agree to pay by April 21, "the Municipality may regard the document request as abandoned."
The union coalition filed the original records request on Sept. 16. The request sought records from seven different city departments and 17 individuals, in addition to all current Assembly members and any former members in office since January 2012. Coffey was not one of the people named in the original records request, though he was cited in the motion for a temporary restraining order.