Don’t make public records harder to get

During my time as a journalist, which is a very long time, public institutions hated public records requestseven while claiming they didn’t.

Ask your typical elected or hired official, from the governor to animal control officials; They will tell you that transparency is vital and it is vital. Sunlight is an important asset in government.

Then submit to the most innocuous of public records requests — for example accessing a calendar – and prepare for weeks of delays and excuses. Do you want emails or financial records or, God forbid, anything from the police? It can take months or even years for a single page to be delivered, no joke.

That’s why I’m deeply concerned about the passage of a bill in the California Legislature that will certainly slow down public records requests and likely make them more difficult and expensive. At worst, it could land people in costly court battles just for having the audacity to ask for information.

Legislation, Parliamentary Bill 1821Written by Democratic Assemblyman. Blanca PachecoThe district, which includes Norwalk, Downey and Bell, is Example 1 of why public records of legendary scandals are important.

Pacheco’s office told me Wednesday that the problems with the bill are far from what Pacheco wants to do.

“The author’s intention was never to take away people’s rights. [Public Records Act] demand,” said his chief of staff, Nikki Johnson.

Johnson said the bill aims to reduce malicious records requests, in which a citizen goes after copious amounts of records just to be stupid and costs the government time and money.

It was also intended to address the growing problem of AI and other for-profit businesses requesting thousands of records to use the information to create money-making products; Consider the sites that currently sell publicly available personal information as “background checks.”

I believe Johnson believes in the good intentions of the bill to address real, albeit uncertain, challenges, but you know what they say about best-laid plans.

The bill passed the House with ease recently, largely because most – though not all – of its problematic parts (more on those in a moment) were removed. Even in a watered-down form that essentially gave the government more time to respond to demands, I found myself in the unlikely position of agreeing. conservative Republican House member and Trump supporter Carl DeMaio of San DiegoThose who offered the only opposition from elected leaders during the parliamentary vote.

“We cannot police the public’s right to information, and we want to err on the side of transparency in the operation of government agencies,” DeMaio said.

Amen brother.

But the Democrat-controlled House instead erred on the side of secrecy and slowdown, and the measure went to the Senate; a bunch of new provisions were added out of the blue there, filling it with loopholes, vague language, and tons of room for abuse.

David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said the bill as currently written is “comprehensively bad for transparency and therefore government accountability.”

Sean McMorris, transparency, ethics and accountability program manager for the advocacy organization California Common Cause, put it even more forcefully. He pointed out that “public records are the records of the public.”

“These are not in the hands of the state,” he said. But this bill will change that paradigm and allow the public to “prove why they need them.”

“This will alienate people who want to make claims, it will complicate the process, and that is absolutely wrong,” McMorris said.

In its new form, the bill essentially allows government agencies to decide whether a public records request is made in bad faith or for commercial gain. If they do so, they can petition the court to intervene; this could potentially lead to both legal costs and new fees associated with executing the request.

Snyder said it would also force the requester to explain why they want the records; It’s something California law has repeatedly avoided because it gives the government the power to treat those it perceives as enemies differently.

In this age of justice and reason, it is difficult to imagine this. Government official abuses power to keep secretsbut I was told it happened. This makes it even more important that people are not forced to explain why they want information or whether they will use it to uncover corruption, for example – whether it be because of wrongdoing by a single person or the entire system.

“I have little doubt that some agencies will use this provision to overburden requesters they view as political opponents, requesters they view as mere hardships, requesters who request things the government does not want to disclose,” Snyder said. “They can take the requester to court and at least slow down the process and possibly get the requester to withdraw.”

The bill as written also includes shoddy regulation intended to protect journalists, but it could actually be used to restrict the demands of freelancers, student journalists and more.

McMorris said access to public records is a “moral issue” and that resolving any problems with current law requires a “scalpel, not a meat cleaver.”

He warned that this bill was a meat cleaver.

“I don’t rule out that there are malicious requests and there are requests that are really burdensome for government agencies, but the law right now has ways for government agencies to address that,” he noted. “Once these laws go into effect, they will be difficult to undo.”

He said this could “fundamentally change” our access to public records.

Johnson, Pacheco’s chief of staff, told me that the House member, faced with all these unintended consequences, would want the amendments to be removed and the bill to proceed as written when it passed the House. That could happen as early as next week, when the bill containing the new provisions is scheduled to be debated in a Senate committee again.

It would be better to go back to the bill the House voted on, but slowing down public records is in the government’s interest, not the public’s. The bill does nothing to fix the problems it sets out to fix, but extends the time authorities must tell a requester if there are any records — let alone hand them over.

So even if we go back to its watered-down form, the bill remains a meat cleaver to the scalpel problem, chipping away at good-intentioned transparency.