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Cal Poly agrees to disclose records following lawsuit

November 21, 2014
Bill Loving

Bill Loving

By KAREN VELIE

Amid a lawsuit against the campus, officials at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo agreed Thursday to release records about the university’s preparation in the event of an outbreak of an infectious disease on campus.

Apologizing for a failure to follow the California Public Records Act, Director of Administrative Compliance Services Matthew Roberts sent an email to Professor Bill Loving saying the records he had requested were available for pickup or electronic delivery. Roberts said the day Loving filed his lawsuit, Nov. 14, his staff began working to gather the records.

“Please accept my apology for the confusion and delay in responding,” Roberts said in his email.

In September, reporters in one of Loving’s classes began to work on a project about illness, hygiene and preparedness. Reporters requested campus health center records citing the California Public Records Act.

After inquiring if the records request was made by a student, Health and Counseling Center Medical Director Karen Hord-Sandquist refused to provide records of its disease preparedness plans. In his lawsuit, Loving said state law requires that those records be open.

Loving named Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong and the university as defendants in his lawsuit. He asked for release of the records and for reimbursement for the cost of the lawsuit.

Loving, also the editor of CalCoastNews, said he plans to supplement his filing and go directly to the request for court costs and fees. The records act says those who sue to get documents can be reimbursed for attorneys’ fees should the government agency lose in court.


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I doubt that any of this was nefarious. Hord-Sandquist is new to Cal Poly and likely didn’t even know that the disease planning was handled by Roberts’ office as part of emergency management planning for the campus. If the request had gone to Roberts as it should have initially, I’m sure the plan would have been provided. It isn’t a secret and it has been in place for many years.


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Anyone who doesn’t like to have authority questioned, should not be reading this publication.


Thank you CCN.


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When institutions and corporations become powerful, they begin to do some rather ugly things. I love to see people stand up. I always stand up. We look up to others that stand up-but we can do the same. One thing I would like to see stop is the way corporations reap huge profits on the backs of minimum wage workers. The only problem is this: there are no “mom & pop” places to shop at if you want to boycott the larger places.


We should have listened to Eisenhower and his “military industrial complex” speech. Because we did not-it is now the “military-pharmaceutical-academic-fast food-health insurance-Walmart complex”.


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Well, indigo1955, part of the reason that “… there are no ‘mom and pop’ places to shop at…” is because the moms and pops can’t afford to pay the costly wage scales that begin with an ever-increasing minimum wage.


The larger businesses are better able to handle labor costs by absorbing them into their high-volume sales.


So, in the real world, you can’t expect to have both an ever-increasing minimum wage AND the little “mom and pop” businesses. So pick which one you are willing to live with.


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I am sure that you mean well and believe wholeheattedly the message you posted. However, if minimum wage had kept apace with the cost of living, it would be well over $20 per hr. right now, So, keeping minimum wages low obviously does NOT prevent inflation. What it does do is keep people too poor to afford the goods and services of the local purveyors. I hear time and again that people would love to do business with me, but they cannot afford my services. I am a helth care provider. I cannot work for less than I do, or I would not be able to afford to live and I make better than what is minimum wage now.


The differences that existed during the Eisenhower administration, which I remember, is that corporations bore at least 50% percent of the nations’ tax burden, cheap foriegn made goods were taxed or just not imported, which protected the American jobs and the uberwealthy were taxed much more highly, preventing the current obscene accumulation of financial resources from being extracted by those who could mass unlimited power by buying off the “elected” officials.


Industry prevented the loss of revenue to taxes by investing in hiring more workers, offering better benefits and making improvements to their facilities (all tactics which created more good paying jobs). These well paid workers supported an enormous market for mom and pop businesses.


Under this former system, we had a thriving economy, thriving middle class, a decent educational system and better, more affordable health care. I fail to see how buying cheap crap imported from China, made by slaves in an environment that is reaching a saturation of pollution never before seen on the planet, to benefit an obscenely wealthy few can be in any way classified “American” by the value system in which I was raised.


Oh, and by the way, his speach writers made him strike the word from the speech, but it was originally “the military, industrial, Congressional complex”.


Namaste


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Your a good man Professor Loving.


Keep defending our right to know as it is one of the only tools in keeping our govt accountable and allowing us to make corrections.


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Guest host and CCN senior reporter Daniel Blackburn will be interviewing Bill Loving on the Dave Congalton Show on KVEC. Turn your radio dial to 920 AM at 6 p.m. on Friday.


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CCN strikes again.


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YOWZER, YOWZER, YOWZER! Thanks so much for holding their feet to the fire about transparency and health-care clinic preparations for outbreaks of infectious diseases.


[singing] We shall overcome…..


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