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In early August, WW reported on a group chat between the six members of the Portland City Council’s progressive caucus, called Peacock.
The City Attorney’s Office initially released 311 pages worth of messages contained in the Peacock chat in late July after WW filed a public records request.
But on Sept 29, the city said that it had discovered far more messages than it had found originally. In total, the city now says there are 732 pages of Peacock messages—that’s more than 400 additional pages beyond those previously released to WW. (Around 100 of those pages contain messages exchanged after WW submitted its request, so they would not have been included in the original release.)
The city released those additional records on Monday to WW.
The Peacock chats stirred a flurry of discussion around public meetings laws and the ethics of such a chat, with over a dozen Portlanders filing complaints with the City Attorney’s Office and the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, alleging councilors broke quorom rules in the chat.
In short, the complainants questioned whether the councilors were conducting public business in private, which the law prohibits. (Both regulatory bodies declined to investigate the matter, citing technicalities in state law that requires a complaint must be filed within 30 days of the alleged violation. At the time, the chats were more than 30 days old.)
The additional 421 pages of records released today could kick up that discussion again—and reignite hard feelings between the Peacock councilors and their centrist colleagues, some of whom took issue with personal jabs made at them in the chat.
In an explanatory memo provided to WW, the City Attorney’s Office took full responsibility for the missing records. The memo cites a porous search system and the fact that the city had never been asked to produce a Microsoft Teams chat before, and so was unclear of how to best search for all messages.
“Neither [Bureau of Technology Services] nor the State’s eDiscovery department knew how to fully export individual Teams chats,” the memo reads. “It appears we were the first public entity to confront this issue.”
The city says that after its first search that produced 311 pages of records, they adjusted the search queries. “Surprisingly, this search yielded approximately 623 pages— including messages containing “Peacock” that should have appeared in the first search but did not,“ the memo explains.
The city then tried a third approach to try and capture additional records. That resulted in the hundreds of additional pages released today.
City Attorney Robert Taylor says he believes his office has captured all the relevant messages.
“The City Attorney’s Office believes we have identified all the chat messages subject to the public records requests using the known technological tools available to us.”
