The city of Rancho Palos Verdes is threatening to sue a former mayor to force him to produce emails from his private account that are considered public record.

City Attorney Dave Aleshire said Brian Campbell has cost the city $87,500 in legal fees because he refuses to respond to multiple records requests dating back to 2016. The requests come from lawyers for Green Hills Memorial Park, which has been entangled in a lawsuit with the city and residents of an adjacent condominium complex in Lomita over the construction of a mausoleum.

The city cannot access the emails because Campbell used a personal Gmail account, rather than the city’s server, to conduct city matters. By law, the emails are public record because Campbell was a public official.

While Campbell was in office, city policy only discouraged the use of personal email servers for city business. Only recently did City Council change the policy to outright ban the use of private servers and require officials to use the city account.

Campbell, who is on the Palos Verdes Library District Board of Trustees, says he used a personal Gmail because it was more efficient. The city email service had problems with firewalls and emails not getting through, he said, and he had multiple iterations of city email addresses. Eventually, he asked the IT department to forward the emails from all the different addresses to a Gmail account he created for city business.

But efficiency for Campbell has created a headache for the city, which can’t simply override his access to the account to get the emails for records requests.

Under the California Public Records Act, the public has the right to request and review government records, unless they are exempted by law. Public records include email correspondence to and from public officials unless the emails include privileged information.

“Brian is in a funny position because if he just turns over a thousand emails and there’s sensitive content in them, the city could say, ‘Hey, you turned over sensitive content,’ ” said Campbell’s attorney, Jeff Lewis. “It would put him in legal jeopardy.”

Since Campbell can’t release the emails haphazardly, he needs to go through them with a city attorney to identify which emails can be released and which cannot.

According to Aleshire, Campbell has refused to meet with members of the city’s legal team — even when meetings have been scheduled — to go through his emails. And every time a meeting is canceled, it’s still billed to the city.

But Campbell insists it’s Aleshire who has been uncooperative.

“I have made a consistent effort since last year to get the city attorney to cooperate with me to save money in running a more efficient city attorney legal process,” Campbell said. “I think that the city attorney has spent an unfortunate amount of time avoiding cooperating in regards to some of these records requests.”

He can’t meet with just any lawyer from Aleshire’s firm, he said, because it was Aleshire who attended all the City Council’s closed-session meetings.

“It’s a delay tactic,” Aleshire said. “… His latest excuse is that he has to do it with me.”

Aleshire said that an attorney in his office has been appointed to handle the records requests and to meet with Campbell. If the attorney is unsure if an email has sensitive information, they can ask Aleshire, he said.

City Manager Doug Willmore and Aleshire agreed that Campbell should meet and work with only that attorney to maintain continuity.

Before requesting to meet only with Aleshire, Campbell told the city attorney he would provide the emails by early March, but did not when the time came, saying he needed to go through it with the city attorney himself, Aleshire said.

Campbell has produced some emails to the attorneys at Green Hills, Lewis said, but in a recent deposition for the case the city is no longer party to, Campbell stated he needed the city attorney’s advice before he could provide the rest.

City Council members will discuss taking Campbell to court in closed session sometime during the next few council meetings, but they will have to decide if it’s really worth taxpayer money to do that.

“It would be unprecedented and I can’t imagine that Dave Aleshire would want his lack of cooperation out for all to see in a lawsuit,” Lewis said.

“This has been an inefficient process and, if these two gentlemen could just sit in a room and hash it out, it would be resolved a hell of a lot faster than in a lawsuit.”