Sonoma County supervisors are deleting their text messages on wildly different timelines — some weekly, some annually, one almost as soon as the next day arrives — and when a reporter went looking for texts tied to a July 2025 county meeting, officials said none could be found. The gap has transparency advocates warning that the county's approach to electronic communication falls short of what good government requires.
The request centered on a quarterly meeting of the Emergency Medical Care Council, an advisory body that counsels the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and oversees the county's emergency medical system, held on July 28, 2025. According to The Press Democrat, committee chair Jeff Schach said remote members could not vote or participate in discussion during that meeting, and board member Steve Herzberg texted Schach about his interest in an agenda item while it was underway. The county attorney had advised committee members not to exchange text messages during the meeting under the Brown Act, but Schach said his own texts were permitted because he was acting as Herzberg's proxy.
The Press Democrat requested the meeting's texts and emails six months later. County officials reported that no responsive text messages were found in the possession of board members. No responsive text messages were found, and whether any had existed or what happened to them remains unclear.
Supervisors Set Their Own Deletion Schedules
There is no single county rule governing how long supervisors must hold onto texts, and each has adopted a personal habit. Supervisor Rebecca Hermosillo said she does not conduct county business through text messages at all, and per the same account, she deletes her texts as often as the next day. Supervisor Lynda Hopkins said she deletes messages regularly to save phone memory space, with hers set to clear automatically after 30 days. Supervisor David Rabbitt said he deletes his texts weekly.
Supervisor James Gore said he treats texts like a Post-it note message, with his own set to delete automatically once a year. He said he models his texting approach on Governor Gavin Newsom's, replying with thanks to positive messages and promising follow-up on negative ones. Board vice chair Chris Coursey said he deletes his texts rarely, explaining that anything put in writing is discoverable and that he keeps written communications professional, saving unwanted matters for phone calls and personal conversations instead.
All of the supervisors told the newspaper that their text messages rarely contain the kind of substantive information sought in public-records requests. Rabbitt described the texts that typically surface in such requests as often involving family exchanges and fundraising appeals, saying his own messages generally would not add to public discourse.
What the County's Retention Policy Actually Says
Sonoma County's record retention policy does not specifically address text messages, leaving officials to delete them according to their own judgment about whether the content fits other retention categories. County counsel Joshua Myers said deleting text correspondence is permissible when its substance isn't covered by the retention schedule, and he listed spam, advertisements, meeting-scheduling messages, duplicate copies, and informal logistical communications as examples of what can be deleted. Myers also said the policy is based partly on past practice rather than any written principle distinguishing how email and Microsoft Teams messages should be treated differently.
That retention schedule does draw sharper lines elsewhere. It requires permanent retention of directives that establish or revise policies, two-year retention of emails, and just 30-day retention of Microsoft Teams messages. The county recently extended its email retention window from 60 days to two years. The policy can be reevaluated and updated at any time, per the county.
The legal backdrop traces to a unanimous 2017 California Supreme Court ruling in City of San Jose v. Superior Court, which established that writings about public business sent on private devices or personal accounts count as public records under the California Public Records Act. The act requires preservation and disclosure of records created during government business, but it does not specify exactly how long those records must be kept, leaving California cities and counties to determine their own retention timelines.
Why Standards Vary So Widely Across California
State law does set some statutory floors. Under Government Code Section 26202, county boards may approve destruction of records prepared or received pursuant to state statute or county charter that are not expressly required to be kept permanently only with a four-fifths vote; certain other county records more than two years old may be destroyed without that stated four-fifths-vote requirement.
But no uniform statewide rule governs text-message auto-deletion specifically.
David Snyder of the First Amendment Coalition said the county's text-message guidance does not align with local-government best practices. Snyder said a text message concerning public business is a public message even when it's sent on a personal phone, and that greater preservation is better from a transparency perspective. The use of Signal and disappearing messages has also drawn scrutiny in discussions of public records.
Other California Officials Have Faced Similar Scrutiny
Sonoma County is far from alone. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass faced criticism in March 2025 after disclosures showed her phone automatically deleted texts after 30 days, leaving no records available for public-records requests about her response to the Pacific Palisades wildfire, according to the Santa Monica Mirror.
Closer to home, a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge allowed a California Public Records Act lawsuit to proceed in June over private group texts, labeled “Tammany Hall,” exchanged among San Jose City Council members — a case Hoodline detailed in a related report. And just last month, Hoodline reported that the California Office of Emergency Services set a policy for January 2027 that will automatically delete staff emails after 90 days, shifting the burden onto individual employees to manually preserve key records.
Requests Keep Coming In
The demand for county records hasn't slowed. Sonoma County has received 650 public-records requests since June, while Permit Sonoma logged 215 and Public Infrastructure received 94 over the same stretch; the Auditor-Controller-Treasurer-Tax Collector's office fielded 65. The Board of Supervisors and County Executive's Office alone received 96 requests in 2025 and already has 90 so far in 2026.
Text records have mattered before in Sonoma County. After the 2017 North Bay firestorm, The Press Democrat obtained nearly 1,000 pages of records that shed light on officials' reactions to failures to send mass cellphone alerts during the disaster — a reminder of what can be lost when day-to-day messages about public business aren't kept.
