To obtain relevant documents, the local chapter tangled with the city for multiple years, starting in 2021, and involved the American Civil Liberties Union. The nonprofit did not receive its long-sought criteria, said Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter founder Tanya Faison.
About three years ago in Fresno County, a person sought material under the state’s public records law spanning the entire career for 24 retired employees. To determine what must be disclosed, county staff would have had to examine 700 million images, microfilm negatives and electronic databases, said sheriff’s spokesperson Tony Botti. After staff informed the requester about the expansive scope, that person did not respond.
The nexus between these two instances is the California Public Records Act, a law that mandates disclosing certain documents held by government agencies. The law, however, has shortcomings which stymie both advocates seeking records and municipalities attempting to fulfill them, according to interviews with county officials, a First Amendment expert and a community leader.
Now, the California State Association of Counties is looking into some reforms based on county complaints. But solutions are hard to immediately draft because reform could be seen as scrubbing away transparency, said Eric Lawyer, a senior legislative advocate with the association.
“It’s a challenge to do that, and you want to be careful,” he said, while also noting that counties take their responsibility of being transparent very seriously.
‘Failing to keep up’
Counties of all sizes and all regions submitted concerns approximately two years ago in a CSAC survey about the annual increase in requests and its expansive nature, requiring a hefty amount of work, Lawyer said.
For example, one county received a request for five years’ worth of 911 calls, which resulted in 160,000 pages, he said. Those documents must be examined by government employees to redact any personal identifying information or other information allowed to be withheld.
There is no sense, however, if an increase in public records requests equals a rise in burdensome work for staff. A sharp uptick in inquiries does not mean each one is voluminous, and may be accomplished by proactively disclosing information, said David Loy with the First Amendment Coalition.
Municipalities should try to find as many efficiencies as possible to be accountable while showing how much staff time it takes to fulfill a response, he said.
“Government works for the people,” he said. “People don’t work for the government.”
Requests requiring labor-intensive responses are not rare, but do make up a small percentage of residents wanting documents, said Nevada County Counsel Kit Elliott. She also serves as the president of the County Counsels’ Association of California.
But Elliott, whose office hired an attorney to keep up with residents seeking public documents, said the law is completely anachronistic. The California Public Records Act request was created in 1968, when government agencies had to use a typewriter to produce information.
“The statute itself is simply failing to keep up with current standards and completely ignores the burden that’s placed on counties due to the technological advances,” she said.
Her office has seen a rise in public records by about 1,000 requests across two years.
The Placer County Elections’ Office saw a spike in public records requests as the 2022 midterm elections approached, said Stacy Robinson, a spokesperson for the Placer County’s Clerk, Recorder and Election’s Office.
Robinson said she was hired in 2022 in part to ease the burden on elections staff as they attempted to balance both fulfilling public records requests while putting on an election. She manages the workload of a PRA through publishing documents ahead of time online and when repeated public records requests come in.
“We wouldn’t have been able to facilitate the elections the way we needed to,” she said.
As repeated PRAs come to the Placer County’s Clerk, Recorders and Election’s Office, Robinson knows a particular story in the news cycle spurred duplicate inquiries.
She attributed a rise in records requests in 2022 related to the dialogue about election security and residents’ general consciousness of the law requiring disclosure. President Donald Trump sowed lies about losing the 2020 election and falsehoods about the Dominion Voting Systems.
Robinson has thumbed about 75,000 pages related to any record produced by the county in relation to the Dominion Voting Systems, she said. Now, if a resident seeks to parse those records, she can welcome them to her office and handily offer up those documents for them to examine.
In the 2024 election, however, she did not see an uptick in PRAs, Robinson said.
Robinson said the Public Records Act does allow residents to build trust with government officials. Still, there are drawbacks, she said.
“Access to that information is vital to a community and to the trust that they have in their local governments,” Robinson said. “But I also do think for smaller jurisdictions, it can be quite burdensome as they try to allocate their resources to meet all needs.”
The state’s public records act does not allow local officials to be reimbursed for their work, which can weigh especially for smaller communities without a deep well of resources, Lawyer said.
“It’s vital that the Public Records Act can serve its true purpose, but not be used as a tool against itself,” he said.
Elliott said she’s interested in a solution related to the “vexatious litigator,” or someone who very commonly files burdensome requests, she said.
“There’s got to be some limits to the person that just continues to bombard you with requests,” she said.
Faison, the Black Lives Matter leader, said after years she still is not aware if police have a criteria to stop residents accused of gang violence.
There is no significant penalty for government agencies failing to disclose documents, Loy said. If a person sues a municipality for withholding records and wins, government officials may have to pay their opposing counsel’s fees racked up on the case.
“If there were strong monetary penalties and strong consequences for failure to comply, then we might see prompt compliance,” Loy said.
The California Public Records Act does set deadlines to respond to the person inquiring for documents and provides deadlines for ultimately unveiling papers.
Still, municipalities often run behind on meeting those timelines by claiming they are overwhelmed, Loy said. Officials could better allocate resources and efficiencies to be more proactively transparent, he said.
“That’s a problem of their own making,” Loy said.
Reality Check is a Bee series holding officials and organizations accountable and shining a light on their decisions. Have a tip? Email realitycheck@sacbee.com.
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