Metropolitan Transit District Chief Executive Officer Paul Jablonski spent 52 minutes of the first day of March on a website that features videos about how to fly fish, records show.

Cardiff School District Superintendent Jill Vinson browsed on Ticketmaster.com five minutes into opening a web browser on her company computer at 9 a.m. the same morning.

And Julian Union School District Superintendent Brian Duffy watched Tim Tebow arrive at New York Mets spring training in a Facebook video.

Each internet episode occurred on a mid-week work day on the public agency’s wired or wireless network.


U-T Watchdog in March requested the web activity of more than 100 top public officials in San Diego County as part of an annual Sunshine Week exercise to bring attention to issues of transparency in government.

The request sought records of web activity, including sites visited and the time and duration of the visits by the official. To limit the volume of information requested, the U-T sought the traffic for that single day, March 1.

If the agency could not fulfill the request for the day in question — for example, if the city manager was out of the office — the Watchdog agreed to another date in March. The U-T has received the documents from 40 of the agencies contacted under the California Public Records Act.

Thirteen agencies provided the web-activity logs within four business days — including the cities of Coronado, Del Mar, Encinitas, Escondido, Imperial Beach, San Marcos and Vista. The county also responded in that timeframe, as did the Helix and Olivenhain water districts, Mountain Empire and San Dieguito school districts and MiraCosta Community College.


Twenty-seven agencies provided the records in more than four business days, including the Metropolitan Transit District, which revealed Jablonski’s fly-fishing activity.

The remaining agencies have either declined the requests or are still processing them.

Loss of productivity

At MTS, Jablonski was granted a raise in March — retroactive to Jan. 1 — placing his annual salary at $371,316.

Via email, he said he was searching for a birthday gift on the fly-fishing website for 15 minutes on a lunch break on March 1.


MTS uses Barracuda Networks Web Filter, and the documents released were produced using that software, which is designed to measure active web use. The records log 52 minutes at howtoflyfish.orvis.com between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.

An MTS spokesman said that the longer time period shown in district records was the result of an inactive tab left open on Jablonski’s web browser.

In addition to the flyfishing site, Jablonski visited a camping reservation website and a religious school website in the 3 p.m. hour

“Very little time is spent at work on personal web use,” Jablonski said via email. “Conversely, I spend far more time on MTS and transit business while on my ‘personal’ time. My job is really 24/7.”


The Cardiff School District’s content-filtering software has a risk-class category for “productivity loss,” which includes entertainment and shopping websites.

Superintendent Vinson spent almost 10 percent of her internet usage on websites in this category on March 1, records show.

Vinson’s executive assistant, Martha Bailey, said the district could not comment on how “productivity loss” is categorized, but “items that are routinely disseminated throughout the education community, such as education news and media, have been categorized under this heading.”

Via email, Vinson said that the Union-Tribune website is included in the lost productivity category.


Vinson said her search on the Ticketmaster website came from the wireless network on her smartphone while she was out at a meeting and that the category seems to be inaccurate “given that local and national educational news links are disseminated to county educational organizations for review on a daily basis.”

Julian Union School District provided the web activity history for Superintendent Duffy within eight days. Email subject lines — even from his work account — were redacted.

Duffy, who viewed videos on Bill Nye’s television show and Tim Tebow’s arrival into baseball, said his daughter sent him the links via email to look at the inspirational content to share with his students.

“I know that pretty much everything I do is supposed to be transparent,” he said. “That’s part of being at a public school.”


‘No expectation of privacy’

In making requests for web-browsing data, U-T Watchdog first sought information about internet use policies at each of the government agencies.

Escondido has employees sign a consent form saying “all electronic messages and records maintained on my computer may be subject to disclosure pursuant to the California Public Records Act” and “users should have no expectation of privacy when using these computers.”

The U-T then cited those policies, in addition to public records laws, in seeking web browsing histories. Despite that, records were not always forthcoming. Many agencies have the term “no expectation of privacy” in their web policies — and seven of those declined to hand over records.

The Lakeside Fire Protection District’s technology-use policy informs employees that they forfeit any expectation of privacy in regard to any internet site accessed, transmitted, received or reviewed on any district technology system.


But in response to a request for Fire Chief Donald Butz’s web activity, Administrative Services Manager Robert Schiwitz said he was not able to provide any records.

“We have discussed this with our information technology consultant and he did not believe that there were any records available based on this request,” Schiwitz said by email.

David Snyder, executive director of an open-government advocacy group known as the First Amendment Coalition, said there could be issues with records retention requirements.

“As a general rule, government agencies are required to retain government records for at least two years, and I think these are public records,” he said.


Some governments said they would not provide records of web activity, saying the public interest in keeping the records private outweighs the public interest in releasing them.

Caridad Sanchez, spokeswoman for the California Department of Transportation in San Diego, said web records are exempt from disclosure because they are a preliminary draft.

Darl Danford, legal specialist for the Poway Unified School District, said that web browsing history does not become public just because employees are told the information is not confidential.

“The policy makes all of the district’s computer resources used by employees subject to being monitored by the district, not by the public,” he said in an email.


Dominoe Franco, public records coordinator for San Diego State University, said the request was overly broad and sought documents protected by the “deliberative process exemption” of the California Public Records Act.

“Some of the information on the records would be exempt,” Franco said. “If you want to ask for something specific on the web browser, we can review the request.”

California State University San Marcos also cited the deliberative process exemption.

At the First Amendment Coalition, Snyder said there’s nothing deliberative about visiting a website.


“I don’t see how providing (web activity) somehow impedes agencies’ ability to deliberate internally,” Snyder said. “You’re talking about one person’s web browsing history — there’s no deliberation there. There’s no ongoing topic.”

Three agencies have provided no records at all — not even web usage policies. Those are the Bonsall Union School District, Lakeside Water District and City of San Diego.

» Listing of which agencies have complied, and which have not

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