Mayor Bass' texts on Palisades Fire response were not saved

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- The text messages Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sent and received about the Palisades Fire were not saved.

7 On Your Side Investigates filed a public information request for all text messages Bass sent and received about the fires while she was on a trip to Africa and once she returned to Los Angeles after the fires sparked.

Mayor Bass told Eyewitness News why those records were not available to us - and to the public.

"My phone did an automatic delete after 30 days," Bass said.

Both state and city law require government officials to save official communications, but city lawyer David Michaelson said the laws do not apply to text messages.

To hear that the mayor's texts were set to automatically delete was deeply troubling to transparency advocates.

"There is no way for the press and public to hold government fully accountable without access to all the information to do that," said David Loy with the First Amendment Coalition.

The mayor said that, to her understanding, she was within the law.

California law states that public record "includes any writing containing information relating to the conduct of the public's business, regardless of physical form or characteristics."

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On top of that, Los Angeles administrative code states most public records must be saved for two years.

"I don't know if the mayor was briefed on this or just ignorant to the relevant law - so I am not ascribing any bad faith here," said Loy. "But at the end of the day, the city needs to follow its own rules that it adopted for itself to retain all of these kinds of records at least for two years."

Meanwhile, 7 On Your Side Investigates has 19 open records requests with the mayor's office for her and her staff's communications around the Jan. 7 fires.

So far, no records have been received.

In a letter from the mayor's office, Eyewitness News was told it may not be until June 5 when Mayor Bass' emails from around that time would be released.

When asked about that date, Mayor Bass said, "No, no, no. I promise you they will be, we will respond to it. We are on it this week."

Bass said she turned that auto-delete function off and that her office is looking for ways to retrieve those text messages.