California must not set public rates outside of public records

By David Snyder, especially for CalMatters

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At a time in our country’s history when transparency is more important than ever, a California lawmaker wants to make it harder for the public to get information from the government.

Bill introduced by Member of the Assembly Blanca PachecoDemocrat from Downey, would amend the California Public Records Act to make it more expensive — in many cases much more expensive — for the public to obtain records from state and local agencies.

That would cost a lot of Californians in general.

Assembly Bill 1821 would make it much more difficult for parents to learn about their school districts, for community members to get the full story about police shootings, and for concerned Californians to tracking the local impacts of the Trump administration’s actions.

California’s public records law, though it only applies to state and local agencies, has proven to be an important tool for understanding the local effects of President Donald Trump’s policies.

For example, the Coalition for the First Amendment recently won the edition of Ventura County sheriff’s deputy body camera footage that aided ICE in raiding farms. The action resulted in one death and more than 300 arrests. The sheriff refused to release the tape until my organization used the act to file a lawsuit on behalf of Buen Vecino, a local immigrant advocacy group.

Under AB 1821, after the sheriff releases the recording as required by law, he can charge an hourly rate for any time over two hours needed to review and edit the recording before releasing it. This could be tens or even hundreds of hours. So, depending on the rate the sheriff’s department decided to charge — something the bill doesn’t cap — it could cost thousands of dollars.

Most Californians couldn’t afford that.

Ironically, one hopes not intentionally, the language of this bill became public in March, amid the Sunny weeka national holiday of government transparency.

Pacheco’s bill would create different fee regimes for different types of information requesters. This would allow free exemptions for a “journalist”, “newspaper” or “educational or non-commercial scientific institution”.

This puts each state and local government entity in the position of deciding who qualifies as a journalist. And that would mean organizations like Buen Vesino could be stuck with a big bill.

Even if a reporter can convince an agency that they qualify for a fee waiver, the bill would still hurt newsgathering because reporters will be working in an environment with less transparency.

Excessively high fees could chill taxpayer groups investigation into pensions of civil servants expenses, for example. Civil liberties advocates may be discouraged from analyzing the implementation of Racial Justice Act. Advocates of social justice could shy away from examining the police’s treatment of the homeless. And environmental nonprofits could refrain exercising oversight over government agencies.

When you value the public outside of public records, important information will remain unavailable for everyone.

Most California lawmakers wouldn’t dream of allowing the Trump administration to make it harder for ICE or the Department of Homeland Security to obtain public records by pricing out people or groups with the fewest resources. Lawmakers should not allow this ill-conceived bill to do the same in their own backyard.

Transparency is the lifeblood of accountability in government. Accountability is how people keep government on course. If the people do not know what the government is doing, they cannot hold it accountable.

Pacheco’s bill would make it much more difficult for Californians to hold their government — local, state and federal — accountable.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.