The Redmond File

I. The Case at a Glance

The City of Redmond closed the 73‑year‑old Old Fire House Teen Center at 16510 NE 79th Street in March 2025 and voted to demolish the building 6–0 in November 2025. The closure was executed through a process that starved the facility of $94K in routine maintenance, suppressed the decision‑making record from public disclosure, and aligned the cleared land with a development portfolio whose principals sit on the same private board as the Mayor and fund her campaigns.

The City's public‑records production in response to PRA #32782, reconciled April 24, 2026 against the full 4,846‑email deduplicated corpus using the extract_msg 0.55.0 Outlook OLE2 parser, is on its own prima facie evidence of obstruction: approximately 23.8% excess duplicate copies; four named City officials with zero outgoing records against substantial inbound volume; near‑total suppression of December 2024 in a month of documented heavy activity; only 6 post‑cutoff emails across the twelve months following March 30, 2025; zero mentions of "Kenmore"; drive‑level byte‑identical duplicate zip delivery; and no exemption, privilege, or Vaughn‑style log provided with any of seven installments.

II. The Cast

Every person below is a public official, a public‑facing donor listed on the PDC, or a named member of a public board. No private individuals are named.

A. City of Redmond — Elected and Appointed

B. The Pipeline — Donors, Developers, and Permit Counsel

C. The Communications Contractor

III. Master Timeline

Events organized chronologically. Each entry is tagged: CONFIRMED (fact with record), PATTERN (suspicious correlation, not yet proven intent), RECORD (dated but legally neutral).

IV. The Evidence, by Category

IV.A. FOIA Production Suppression (PRA #32782)

Mechanisms of obstruction in the City's response to PRA Request #32782, as reconciled April 24, 2026 against the full 4,846‑email deduplicated corpus using the extract_msg 0.55.0 Outlook OLE2 parser library. Each is independently provable.

IV.B. Campaign Finance & Conflict of Interest

All data from the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission (pdc.wa.gov). Aggregations computed from raw PDC data, preserved in evidence archive.

• No‑bid OneRedmond contracts: Feb 2023 $300K (7–0 consent), Mar 2025 $300K. Birney voted for both without recusal.
• $12.0M in property taxes forgiven via MFTE in 2023 alone across 3 developments; 11.5% affordable output ratio.
• All donations queryable at pdc.wa.gov · search "Birney, Angela".

IV.C. Property Transfer Anomalies

• Plymouth Housing — $5.5M land + $3.2M cash. 22 days from first mention to approval. Kenmore rejected identical proposal 22 days earlier after 3 public hearings. No Redmond public comment. No RFP. No competing bidders.
• Transfer Option Agreement — amendments negotiated through Aug 2024 and finalized during the December 2024 suppression window. Amendment and ALTA Title Insurance each referenced in body text 4×; per‑email attachment‑presence verification blocked by absence of any Vaughn index (see § IV.A.C).
• Bond letters — 17 MB PDF: Mayor's Letters of Intent regarding the Plymouth bond.
• Post‑announcement upzone — Jun 28, 2025, OFH site upzoned 144 ft / FAR 8.0 after teen center closure announced but before demolition vote.

IV.D. OFH Starvation Record

• Capital equipment denial — Item 2 PDF: documents $94,000+ in routine maintenance requests denied between 2018–2025.
• Budget vs. actuals — Master budget XLSX and OFH‑specific XLSX: teen center revenue starved to ~5.8% of stated goal. Maintenance line deferred repeatedly.
• Facility assessment — FCA Final · FCA v4: building declared operable; closure justified on "too expensive to maintain" grounds despite denied maintenance.
• Alternative facilities — Plan XLSX: initial plan for relocating teens to RCCMV.
• Post‑closure engagement — Phase 2 PDF: "community engagement plan" produced after the decision was already made.
• Team meetings — Jan 2023 · Nov 2023 · Feb 2024 · Aug 2024
• Internal admission — Erica Chua: "it was decided that the teen center was going to be demolished because it was deemed too expensive and effortful to upkeep it" — passive voice, no decision‑maker named. See transition memo.

IV.E. Retaliation & Surveillance Record

• Teen sign confiscations — teens opposing the closure had signs seized by staff at public meetings.
• Code of Conduct deployment — public‑meeting Code of Conduct applied selectively to critics.
• Retaliatory surveillance — 5‑point "Watson report" on the named community plaintiff escalated to the Mayor's Office within 13.5 hours of filing.
• COVID precedent — Fire Chief Tommy Smith terminated 13 days after COVID‑cover‑up allegations; $95K severance with non‑disparagement clause; investigator hired for $49,999.99 (precisely $0.01 under council‑approval threshold) whose scope included identifying the whistleblower.
• These constitute the factual predicate for a 42 USC §1983 First Amendment retaliation claim.

IV.F. Documents Produced by the City — The Primary Record

Every document below is in the City's own production. We are linking to their files, not ours.

• Official news release 3/11/25
• Staff talking points (the ones repeatedly referenced then stripped elsewhere)
• City‑prepared FAQs
• Community stakeholder outreach plan
• Project charter — OFH communications
• OFH facility discussion presentation
• Council agenda memo
• Consulting services agreement
• Stepherson & Associates contract
• Affidavit exhibits (compiled)
• Supervisors' 3/11 agenda
• Study session notes

V. Unproven Patterns & Open Questions

This section documents patterns that are suspicious but not yet proven. We list them so the public record is complete and the responsible party knows the analysis is honest about what it does and does not yet have. These items appear as open investigative leads; they are not asserted as facts.

VI. Legal Exposure — What the Statutes Say

Washington Public Records Act — RCW 42.56

• RCW 42.56.030 — right of access. "The people…do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know."
• RCW 42.56.070 — duty to provide fullest assistance.
• RCW 42.56.080 — records in their normal retained format. Absent a Vaughn‑style index, per‑email verification of attachment‑level production is impossible.
• RCW 42.56.210(3) — every withholding in whole or in part must be accompanied by a written statement identifying the specific exemption and a brief explanation. No exemption or privilege log was provided with any of seven installments.
• RCW 42.56.550(4) — penalties $5–$100/day per record for wrongful withholding; attorney fees mandatory to prevailing requester.
• RCW 40.14.060 — destruction of public records outside retention schedules is a criminal offense.

Penalty exposure

Under RCW 42.56.550(4), per‑day statutory penalty of $5–$100 per day per record accrues from the date of constructive denial of each wrongfully withheld record. The precise computation is reserved for the Court. Categories of wrongful withholding established on the face of the production — outgoing communications of the four named zero‑outgoing officials, the December 2024 collapse, the full universe of post‑March‑30 substantive records across twelve months of active decision‑making, records mentioning Kenmore, and any records of off‑system communications under Nissen — each generate a per‑day record count whose arithmetic is developed through the Vaughn‑index process demanded in the companion Deficiency Notice. Attorney fees are mandatory for the prevailing requester and are not reserved to the Court's discretion.

Other exposures

• OPMA (RCW 42.30) — $500 personal liability per council member per violation for secret meetings; action can be voided.
• SEPA (RCW 43.21C) — injunctive relief available to halt demolition; fees recoverable under private attorney general doctrine.
• 42 USC §1983 — First Amendment retaliation, uncapped punitive damages against individual officials; attorney fees mandatory under §1988.
• Washington Code of Ethics for Municipal Officers (RCW 42.23) — conflict of interest; voting on contracts for parties in an established private‑body relationship.
• Citizen action complaint (RCW 42.17A.775) — if PDC does not act within 45 days, any person can sue in Superior Court; defendant pays legal fees on plaintiff victory.

VII. Methodology & Custody

Data sources

• Primary production — 4 installments from PRA #32782, totaling 814 MB of original ZIP archives, preserved as received.
• Public databases — WA PDC (campaign finance), IRS Form 990 via ProPublica (OneRedmond nonprofit filings), WA Secretary of State (corporate filings), King County Elections, King County Assessor.

Analysis stack

• FOIA forensics — 8‑variant forensic analyzers (foia_forensic_analyzer.*.py), dedup probes, gap‑finders, ghost‑probes, reply‑chain reconstructors.
• Email integrity — OLE2 header validation, MAPI stream parsing, .msg file corruption typology.
• Reply‑chain reconstruction — RFC 5322 In‑Reply‑To and References header parsing to identify ghost messages referenced but not produced.

Chain of custody

• Hashing — SHA‑256 manifest over evidence files; manifest preserved with the archive.
• Version control — Evidence archive under git; commits document every addition. Forensic databases (corkboard.db, tampering_evidence.db, foia_complete.db) preserved with database integrity logs.
• Reproducibility — All analysis scripts preserved. Any claim on this page can be re‑derived from the raw production by re‑running the scripts against the preserved databases.
• Mirrors — Evidence archived on local disk + VPS + off‑site. Wayback snapshots of live state at multiple timestamps.

Source documents

VIII. Verify & Act

Verify

• Check the PDC yourself — pdc.wa.gov. Every Birney donation is in their public database.
• Check the OneRedmond board — engage.oneredmond.org/leadership. Verify the names and titles claimed here.
• Check IRS Form 990 (OneRedmond) — ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, EIN 46‑0535220.
• Check the hashes — download the press‑kit zip, verify SHA‑256 against the published manifest.
• File your own PRA #32782 follow‑up — anyone can request the same documents from the City of Redmond. The duplicate inflation, ghost emails, and stripped attachments will be visible to you too.

Act

• File your own PRA request to the City of Redmond — RCW 42.56 gives you standing. Templates we are filing are available; the agency has 5 business days to respond.
• Request your own file if you ever corresponded with the city about this issue — you may be in a reply chain whose counterpart is one of the outgoing records the city has not produced.
• Show up to City Hall public comment. The meeting record matters.
• Contact the investigation — responsible outreach only. saveofh@gmail.com.
• Petition — chng.it/DJ7zrfk7cK (2,100+ signatures).

Press / Media

Forensic data, databases, source files, and annotated evidence are available to qualified reporters on request. The full archive is SHA‑256 hashed; any file served can be verified against the manifest. For methodology details see §VII. Contact saveofh@gmail.com.