Calif. lawmakers probe secret contracts

Lawmakers demanded Thursday that the California Department of Justice provide details about tens of millions of dollars in contracts it erroneously labeled as confidential, shielding them from public view.

Members of a state Senate subcommittee said they would not approve parts of the department's budget until it complied.

"I'm concerned that you have called all these confidential when they probably didn't need to be called confidential," Sen. Michael Machado, the Democratic chairman of the committee, told department officials at the first formal hearing into the concealed contracts.

An Associated Press investigation in January found that the department had improperly concealed scores of contracts with lobbyists, consultants, legal firms _ even couriers and parking garages _ in violation of its own confidentiality rules.

The results suggested that many of the more than 1,700 confidential contracts the agency has signed since 2003 _ valued together at more than $100 million _ were improperly labeled and blacked out in state records.

The department has said the omissions were mistakes and that there was no attempt to hide spending or protect favored contractors from public scrutiny.

On Monday, the department issued a new policy requiring employees to provide written explanation when they seek to withhold contracts from public databases. That explanation must be approved internally by a supervisor, with advice from lawyers when needed.

During Thursday's hearing, lawmakers from both parties said they remained skeptical of the department's practices.

The three-member subcommittee of the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee voted unanimously to direct the department to produce a list of the contracts in question.

"Some of these things definitely should not have been classified as confidential," Senate Republican Leader Dick Ackerman said, noting the AP's finding that more than $1 million in confidential contracts went for parking expenses. "We haven't seen all the information yet, so we don't know if these contracts were going to their friends or colleagues."

The department entered into all the confidential contracts in question during the tenure of former Attorney General Bill Lockyer, elected last November as state treasurer.