Board of Aldermen 12-23-2019 Page 23
So | requested my file and my sheet wasn’t in there. It was interesting because ;through a series of Right
to Knows, in those e-mail exchanges by the administration, they were talking about my Hearing Sheet. So |
wanted to see it. So when | put that Right to Know out there and the City said, “We will let you see the
Hearing Sheets, those we will make pubic”. Great. | specifically asked, and they said, “It’s going to take a
little while, we need like 6 weeks”. And | said, “Well could | see my own Hearing Sheet”. And they said,
“No we are not going to be able to find it, you’re going to have to wait”. Well it kept getting stalled and
finally in the middle of December they delivered on the first batch. What was interesting was there was a
resident who went and got their property file and found their Hearing Sheet and called me and said, “I found
the Hearing Sheet”. And | said, “Well send me a copy” and this was their Hearing Sheet when they went to
talk to KRT and it said, the taxpayer is requesting a second review, bla, bla, bla. Well this individual, | said,
“Well | put in a Right To Know for my Hearing Sheet because it wasn’t in my file” and they said before they
went and found theirs, they said, well can | put in a Right to Know for mine and | said, “yes, put one in and
see what you get”.
Well the day they got the response back from the City they had gone to City Hall to check if there was a
note in their file that they requested be in there. That’s when they called me up and said, “Hey my Hearing
Sheet is right in my file and here it is”. And | said, “well that’s cool yours happens to be there”. But the City
responded that day and delivered their Hearing Sheet and this is what they gave them, fully redacted,
completely black claiming that all of this is confidential information and you can’t see it. And the person was
irate, like | already got a copy. So the next day | get the response from the City on the first batch. They
send me 62 pages like this. So obviously the City after four months, decided that they weren’t going to
allow these Hearing Sheets to be Public Documents. Hey that’s alright, the City gets to change their mind.
But why would you have your staff and the Legal people in the Department go through and cull through
pulling all of these sheets? They pulled them all and now they are just going to black out, | don’t know how
many there are, there could be 600, there could be 800, there could be 1,000,nobody knows. The whole
interesting part of it is | received notification that they lost mine. So | don’t even get mine.
But this is what concerns me, why didn’t the Legal Department say to me, “Mrs. Ortolano, we’ve changed
our position and we are treating this as confidential information”. | have about 10 of these that | happened
to find in people’s files that | printed to see how they were recorded and what was on them. They are
public in the files down in Assessing that are there. Then somehow Legal said, “Nope it is not going to be
information you can see”. And instead of letting me know and saying, “Mrs. Ortolano we changed our
position, if we give this to you it is going to be all black”. | ended up after the first 62 sending an e-mail
saying, “Please stop, you don’t have to send me a whole bunch of black pages, you’ve obviously changed
your mind”. But | clarified and said, “Is my sheet available” and then | received a letter back that seems to
indicate, couldn’t fully understand it that there was not sheet for me. You know? This is what concerns me.
| don’t want to pay for this. | just feel like it’s not right. And had there been open communication it wouldn’t
have happened.
| didn’t go to the last Board of Assessor’s Meeting but | did read that the City has hired back David Cornell
to work on a dashboard to do some development for reporting systems for the City. | think it is awesome, |
think that’s great. The one thing | would put out there is that there is still a huge resistance on the part of
the City to allow any public input or any public discussion about what’s going on. We saw what happened
with KRT; Kim Kleiner and the Administration that you know we are going to let KRT come in and you folks
in the public can talk to them and meet with them and it got cancelled and it got cancelled and the City
decided they weren’t going to allow that, never really telling us it didn’t happen. Then there was the policy
manual. | tried to give input to the policy manual and the manual comes out and everything that | had
suggested was just thrown into the trash.
President Wilshire
Mrs. Ortolano there are other speakers signed up.
Ms. Ortolano So this David Cornell coming is great, but | would like the City to think about letting the public
have some input as to what this dashboard is going to look like and more importantly what the reports are
going to look like because | can tell you that the compatibility of what | want to see in a report so it is useful
