As expected the City of San Jose has appealed a Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge's ruling on the applicability of the California Public Records Act to communications contained on private devices maintained by elected and other government officials. (For background on the ruling, see our entry here.) The City is basing its appeal on a number of arguments ranging from the practical (i.e., applying a search requirement across an entire city workforce would be overly burdensome) to the purely legal argumentative (e.g., individual government officials are not governmental entities as defined under the California Public Records Act.)
One small irony in all of this, as reported in the San Jose Mercury News, is that San Jose has had one of the most forward-looking city policies in this area requiring that messages stored on private devices but concerning public business be kept in perpetuity by the city. The local policy only applies to 30 or so officials (top electeds and their staffs) and not the entire city staff, however.
We'll update this as the case proceeds.