Homeless in Arizona

My view is is you are using government property to do something, such as in this case where Bob Stump was using a government phone to sent text messages, then anything you do on it should be available to the public under the public records laws.

Sadly Judge Randall Warner seems to want to keep what elected officials do using government property secret from the public.

Source

Judge: Not one of utility regulator Bob Stump's text messages is public record

Ryan Randazzo, The Republic | azcentral.com 4:37 p.m. MST March 25, 2016

A judge ruled Bob Stump's text messages don't have to be released

He said they were mostly personal messages

Other messages were protected because they were with an attorney

Judge Randall Warner read the text messages utility regulator Bob Stump deleted from his phone and agreed with a retired judge who already read them, finding they are not public records.

That means the Checks and Balances Project, a clean-energy group that's been trying to access the messages for a year, and sued for them in October, won't get to see what Stump texted to his policy adviser, officials at Arizona Public Service Co., candidates running for the commission or the head of a dark-money group.

"It is ordered that the defendants are not required to produce to plaintiff any of the text messages," Warner wrote in a ruling released Friday.

He ordered the defendants — Stump, the commission and the Attorney General's Office — to preserve a record for what the court reviewed and file it under seal, not to be opened without court orders.

Checks and Balances Executive Director Scott Peterson said the fight isn't over. The group previously was rejected by the judge when it asked to use a fifth type of software to retrieve the messages deleted from Stump's phone, in addition to the four software programs the Attorney General's Office used to collect the messages.

Peterson said the group will ask the judge again.

Stump sent tens of thousands of messages on his phone, regularly deleting them. He asserts none met the definition of a public record. Checks and Balances specifically wanted to review 3,598 messages sent from mid 2014 to early 2015 to 18 individuals.

Stump's phone was seized by the Attorney General's Office in connection with an investigation into a former commissioner. About 13,000 messages were retrieved using the various software, but only 36 of them were matches to those sought by Checks and Balances. Of those 36, not one had any content, Warner wrote in his order.

"That seems curious," Peterson said Friday. "We will be reissuing our motion to allow our forensic expert, who has worked with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other organizations, to ask that we are allowed to see if we are able to capture the other 99 percent of the messages we are after that the attorney general couldn't."

Stump and the commission oppose that idea over concerns about custody and privacy. Stump also has criticized the expert that Checks and Balances wants to use. Bryan Neumeister was an expert witness in the Jodi Arias murder trial, serving serving as a computer forensics expert for Arias' defense team.

Stump has maintained that Checks and Balances is attempting to cast shadows on utility regulators who might increase fees on customers with rooftop solar. Last year it was learned that rooftop solar installer SolarCity Corp. is one of the donors supporting Checks and Balances.

Stump celebrated Warner's decision.

“This solar dark money-funded fishing expedition, undertaken to intimidate regulators, has ended without any fish," Stump said in a prepared statement Friday. "Yet the cost to taxpayers in opposing the release of my personal texts by Checks and Balances has been enormous.”

Warner's decision was similar to an earlier decision not to release the texts. Former Judge David Cole was hired by the court as a "special master" to review the retrieved texts. Cole determined in January that not one was a public record.

In an interview with The Arizona Republic after his report, Cole said the messages retrieved by the various software programs were difficult to quantify because some messages had no sender or receiver identified. Some had dates and times and recipients but no content. And the dates were often improbable, including messages dated years in the future or so far in the past as to predate cell phones.

But Warner wanted a better explanation than Cole's report, which didn't identify how many messages he reviewed or why they should be withheld.

The defendants submitted that index Wednesday. In that filing, the Attorney General's Office disagreed with the other defendants, stating that some of the messages to Corporation Commission staff should be considered public, even though they were sent outside the time frame of those being sought by Checks and Balances.

Checks and Balances on Thursday filed a public records request with the Attorney General's Office seeking those messages the office thought were public records, even if they were outside the dates in the original request.

But Warner filed his order Friday, siding with Stump and the commission, saying none of the messages are public.

"Of the messages that are outside of the dates of request, the vast majority relate solely to personal matters and, therefore, are not be public records," he wrote. "Text messages between Commissioner Stump and attorney Amanda Ho (his former adviser) are attorney-client privileged to the extent they address commission business. To the extent they address purely personal matters, they are not public records."