Coeur d'Alene's City Attorney
Blocked Records About Himself.
Then He Reviewed His Own Denial.

When Mayor Dan Gookin stood up at the April 21 City Council meeting and declared he had "ten years of documentation of city attorneys attacking our police chief," it was the kind of accusation that demands a public record.

The Idaho Fidelity Foundation filed for exactly that on April 30. Four days later, the city said no.

What followed tells you a lot about how Coeur d'Alene handles accountability when the subject of the inquiry is the man doing the reviewing.

The Wrong Citation

The city's first denial cited Idaho Code 74-104(1)(a) as the reason for withholding the records. That statute covers personnel files: performance evaluations, medical records, personal employment data. It has nothing to do with institutional communications between city officials or records of how a city attorney has conducted himself over a decade.

Within hours, the city sent a second letter asking the Foundation to disregard the first one. Same result, different wording. The request was still denied.

The city attorney, Randy Adams, reviewed both denials and signed off on them. The request was about Adams' own conduct. He reviewed it anyway.

What Records That Were Produced Show

The Foundation wasn't working in a vacuum. A separate records request had already produced a chain of emails from April 15 and 16 that painted a clear picture of how the police chief vote came together.

On April 15, Adams sent Gookin a legal opinion telling him he had no authority to appoint a police chief. Gookin pushed back, pointing out that in 2014 Mayor Widmyer had done exactly that when he appointed Chief Lee White. Adams couldn't directly refute it. He acknowledged he wasn't with the city in 2014, reviewed the minutes, and landed on a technical argument: what Widmyer did was a "conditional offer," not an "appointment." HR Director Melissa Tosi described the same 2014 process in her own words and confirmed it was a standard selection committee recommendation. The distinction Adams drew didn't hold up against the city's own account.

Gookin thanked Adams for his thoroughness and said he was proceeding with his appointment anyway.

The next morning, Adams forwarded the entire exchange to council member Dan Sheckler and council president Amy Evans. He copied Interim City Administrator Ron Jacobson. He told Sheckler and Evans that Gookin was trying to "circumvent" the process, and coached them on exactly how to handle it at the meeting: get a council member to ask Adams whether what the mayor was doing was legal, rather than Adams having to interrupt the proceedings himself.

Evans replied with five words: "I appreciate this information."

Six days later the council voted 4-2 to reject Gookin's pick and install Jacobson's candidate, Greg Yeager, a deputy chief from Fort Collins, Colorado.

The Appeal

When the Foundation challenged the denial, the city partially reversed. City Clerk Renata McLeod said some records would be released; the rest would stay withheld under a new citation: 74-106(1), which covers records tied to pending litigation.

What the city produced: the city's personnel policy manual, the Idaho Protection of Public Employees Act, and a 2020 email about Fourth of July alcohol enforcement. Nothing that touched Gookin's claim about a decade of city attorney conduct toward the police department.

The switch in legal citations matters. The first exemption was simply wrong, and the city attorney concurred with it. When pressed, the city switched to a litigation exemption — which is an implicit admission that records responsive to the request actually exist. You don't invoke a litigation exemption to protect records that aren't there.

That exemption also has requirements the city didn't meet. It demands a specific, documented connection between each withheld record and a particular pending case. A blanket citation doesn't satisfy that standard. The Foundation demanded the city identify the litigation for each withheld document. Adams replied that the statute doesn't require that level of specificity, cited case law, and said the matter was closed.

He may be legally correct on that narrow point. But the sequence remains: a records request about the city attorney's conduct was reviewed and denied by the city attorney, twice, using two different legal theories, after the first one was caught being wrong.

What Comes Next

The Idaho Fidelity Foundation is weighing district court options under Idaho Code 74-115. Whether or not those records are ultimately produced, the record of how this denial was handled is already public.

This story is not finished. Additional public records requests are pending with the City of Coeur d'Alene on related matters, and more records have already been produced that raise serious questions about the conduct of city officials during and surrounding the police chief appointment process. Those records involve a sitting federal whistleblower lawsuit, internal communications between council members, and a document that went missing from a public records folder after it passed through the city attorney's hands.

The Idaho Fidelity Foundation will continue reporting. Coeur d'Alene residents deserve to know what their city government has been doing in their name.