Ethics and Sunshine Ordinance

San Francisco is the inventor of the Sunshine Ordinance, now the gold-standard of public records access laws. The Sunshine Ordinance allows anyone to request a wide swath of public records, from emails and texts to or from elected officials or city employees, to calendars, to

EVNA President and attorney Alex Lemberg made a presentation to the EVNA membership in November 2020 on the ins and outs of the Sunshine Ordinance. You can view the PowerPoint from that presentation here.

There is also an editable sample request letter available in Word format here.

Each city agency handles Sunshine requests slightly differently, but a best practice is to copy the City Attorney’s office at cityattorney@sfcityatty.org. This will ensure that your request gets routed to the appropriate place.

If you are not pleased with the results from your Sunshine request, or want to complain about a violation of open meetings laws (the California Brown Act) you have the option of filing a complaint with the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force meets on the First Wednesday of each month at either 4:00 or 7:00 p.m.; more information can be found on their website.

San Francisco also has an Ethics Commission. Sunshine requests and Brown Act violations are a subset of matters handled by the Ethics Commission. The Ethics Commission also hears matters related to campaign finance, financial disclosures of city officials and some employees, lobbyists, and many other ethics-related issues. The Ethics Commission meets on the Second Friday of each month at 10:00 a.m.; more information can be found on their website.