For years, Los Angeles city employees could communicate through Google Chat messages that were automatically deleted after 24 hours.

Even after the practice, which was sanctioned by the city, was uncovered last year by a community group and good government experts questioned whether it violated public records laws, city officials declined to stop it.

This week, after wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other communities, the city abruptly changed course. All one-on-one and group Google Chat messages will now be saved.

The news was announced by the city’s Information Technology Agency on Tuesday in an email to employees. The city enabled Google Chat history “in response to user requests related to the citywide emergency,” the email said, referring to the wildfires.

The email noted that those messages would now be “subject to production in legal proceedings, public records requests, and internal investigations.”

Ted Ross, general manager of the technology agency, confirmed in an email to The Times that Google Chat messages will be saved “indefinitely.” He said preserving the messages will help employees look back on the online dialogues they had during the fires.

“This can be a useful feature for city of Los Angeles employees using Google Workspace to assist with emergency response activities since they can review previous messages in a threaded discussion,” Ross said.

The community group Crane Boulevard Safety Coalition had challenged the city’s use of disappearing messages, contending that it amounted to a secret, self-destructing communications channel for city business. Representatives of the coalition welcomed the decision but accused city officials of tying it to the fire in an attempt to escape liability for years of improperly destroying public records.

The coalition, which sued the city in 2023 challenging its approval of a single-family home in Mount Washington, first found out about the disappearing messages during the lawsuit’s discovery process.

Jamie T. Hall, an attorney representing the coalition, accused the city of being dishonest in linking the change to the wildfires instead of the lawsuit.

“They don’t want to have to take responsibility,” he said. “They want to say that something else prompted this and not have to admit that what they were doing was wrong.”

Ross, the head of the Information Technology Agency, said that “many city employees are working long hours in response to the emergency and the ability to save chats for longer than 24 hours is helpful.” He said he was not familiar with the Crane Boulevard Safety Coalition lawsuit.

Critics have argued that the automatically disappearing messages allow officials to skirt the California Public Records Act, which establishes a right for the public to access records related to government business, as well as the city’s own document retention policies.

City officials have not explained how the disappearing chat feature complied with the state public records law or city policies that require most records be preserved for a minimum of two years.

Google Chat is available to about 26,000 city employees and has been used in some form since the early 2010s. City officials acknowledged last month that employees had long had the ability to communicate both internally and externally with the disappearing messages.

In November, Crane Boulevard Safety Coalition threatened to file an additional lawsuit over the messages.

An agreement between the coalition and the city, signed by a judge last month, said that the city attorney’s office “would immediately conduct an internal investigation regarding the City’s record retention and related policies.”

City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto’s office did not respond to requests for comment about the status of the investigation and whether turning on Google Chat history was related to the Crane Boulevard Safety Coalition’s legal action.

Hall, the attorney for the coalition, said the city needs to formalize its new policy of retaining Google Chat messages. Otherwise, it could switch the chat history off again in the future, he said.

Jamie York, a member of the good government group Unrig L.A., said the city never should have been using the disappearing messages.

“Transparency is really important for an accountable government,” she said. “I think that the city unfortunately becomes motivated to follow the law when it’s threatened by a lawsuit.”

Times staff writer Julia Wick contributed to this report.