Cleveland City Council Staffer Accused of Improperly Accessing Public Records Prompts Outside Investigation

It’s a widely held belief across Cleveland’s Law Department that there are no secrets at City Hall. And this week, City Hall was still abiding by that premise.

Steven Rys, a policy analyst for City Council and assistant to Council President Blaine Griffin, has been covertly downloading thousands of classified files from the city’s public records database for years, city officials claimed on Tuesday, during a press conference in City Hall’s Red Room.

Those files totaled 2,252 unredacted public records since 2021, they said, ranging from police reports with exposed victim information to personnel files with social security numbers. Rys, they claimed, did not have proper clearance to do so.

In back-to-back press conferences on Tuesday, through ad hominem attacks and talks of charges in federal court, the Rys affair has led to a rift splitting a concerned Bibb administration and a City Council adamant to ensure the public that Rys has done nothing wrong.

And instead, as Griffin asserted in a letter on Tuesday morning, outing Rys was nothing but a chess piece to rattle Council two months before one of the most change-worthy general elections in years.

“I believe this accusation has very little to do with Steve,” Griffin wrote in a letter released Tuesday morning. “It’s an attempt to embarrass and undermine our ability to do our job by going after one of our employees.”

“They should be ashamed of themselves,” he added.

Backed by a panel of attorneys from the city’s Law Department, city spokesperson Tyler Sinclair insisted that Rys’ behavior—downloading on average 500 unredacted records per year—warranted a looksee from a third-party counsel. It’s unclear, he told press, where Rys stored or sent those files, or what his motivation for accessing them were.

City spokesperson Tyler Sinclair argued that an outside investigation into Steven Rys’ actions was completely warranted. Credit: Mark Oprea

Or, as a member of the administration put it, a possible criminal investigation. (One suggested a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.) All public records, whether they’re crime reports or medical files, are only released after sensitive info is blacked out—what, they said, Rys should not have been privy to.

“Just because you’re a bank teller,” they said, “doesn’t mean you have access to the safe.”

Though the city had been aware a City Council staffer was accessing such files since last May, more restrictions on GovQA, the digital system used to navigate records, were put in place earlier this year, Sinclair said.

Rys, along with an unnamed number of Council employees, have been temporarily barred from GovQA while the outside counsel, also unnamed, carries out its probe: What was Rys’ motivation? Did those records leave City Hall?

“Our hope is that he wouldn’t have distributed that widely because that would expose the city to significant legal vulnerability and financial risk,” Sinclair told press. If so, “it would put the city in a bad spot from a legal, HR and economic development posture.”

Griffin, who threw together what seemed like a retaliatory press conference right after Sinclair’s, defended Rys, who’s worked at City Hall since 2013, as if Rys was a member of his own family.

All 17 members of Council thought the same, Griffin iterated: Rys was just doing his job; there was no clear policy on city books that said he couldn’t access records—timely information needed for important legislation, after all—as he did; there was no need to fire him, as Griffin was apparently ordered to do. (Hence Tuesday’s press conference.)

Any attacks from Bibb’s “message boy,” as Griffin painted Sinclair, were just that: attacks.

“There is no evidence whatsoever that any of these files were leaked, or used for anything other than his work,” Griffin said from the podium in Council Chamber.

“It’s unfair,” he said. “And it’s a desperate attempt to distract from the administration’s own failure to properly manage its public records database.”

As of today, Rys is still an employee at City Hall. The outside investigation is pending.