SACRAMENTO — Few Californians may have heard of her, but Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco, D-Downey, has gained the reputation as the Legislature’s Queen of Secrecy, as she continues her efforts to keep the state’s residents and media in the dark about how our governments operate. She recently was caught red-handed trying to gut California’s public-records laws, but that still hasn’t dissuaded her from her ignoble quest.
In March, Pacheco introduced Assembly Bill 1821, which would have “let public agencies charge an unspecified, uncapped fee if it takes their workers more than two hours to search for records to fulfill a public records request” and “would also allow the charge if government workers spend more than 10 hours within a month looking for documents requested by the same person,” per CalMatters. It was a direct attack on the public’s right to know, as such charges make it cost-prohibitive for many Californians to oversee their overlords.
This wasn’t Pacheco’s first rodeo, according to the publication: “Pacheco has pushed for several measures to limit disclosure requirements in recent years.” For instance, she authored Assembly Bill 1178. It shields a host of police records from public disclosure, which the First Amendment Coalition says “risks undermining carefully considered transparency provisions that have benefited Californians by shining a brighter light on policing in our communities.”
After First Amendment groups rebelled over AB 1821, Pacheco amended it into something less awful. The legislation gave governments more time to comply with public-records requests, thus slowing a “right to know” process that already is slow-moving and cumbersome. It passed the Assembly, with “ayes” from 55 members — the vast majority of them Democrats. Consider that the next time any of them complain about federal assaults on democracy.
Under current law, agencies have 10 days to notify the requesting person of whether they have the sought-after documents. They can extend it by 14 days under extraordinary circumstances. Nevertheless, officials still whine about an expanded number of record requests, driven by digital communications, and say they need more time to comply.
The Assembly-passed measure would have redefined “days” to “business days.” That might sound minor, but the change could “allow agencies to take well over a month simply to inform a requester whether responsive records exist,” according to opposition comments from privacy groups quoted in the Assembly Judiciary Committee analysis. They worry about time-sensitive matters.
Then it got worse, much worse. Pacheco quietly “brought the controversial elements back — and they are even more restrictive than before, drawing fierce opposition from transparency advocates,” according to CalMatters’ June 15 report, headlined: “This lawmaker’s proposal could make California ‘the most secretive state in the country.’” These new elements, in Senate amendments, would have set the state’s open-records laws on fire.
They gave agencies broad excuses to deny requests, take requesters to court and impose outrageous fees, thus stifling Californians’ ability to gain public information that is rightly theirs. Ostensibly designed to stop commercial entities from using open records for data-scraping operations and critics who file repeated requests supposedly as harassment, the amendments would have handed officials endless tools to quash legitimate records requests.
Any agency could determine the request is a “commercial use” and impose administrative fees of $22.35 an hour plus a professional fee of $66.26 an hour, adjustable for inflation. And who knows how long it might take inefficient bureaucrats to fish through their filing systems to provide such records? It was reported written by two government interest groups, the League of California Cities and the California Association of Counties. Their involvement is no surprise, but shame on them.
Then there’s this doozy: The bill would have let any agency petition the court to determine whether a request was made with, er, “malicious intent.” News organizations already often must go to court to secure crucial documents involving police-involved shootings and potential public-corruption cases. As Los Angeles Times columnist Anita Chabria noted, Pacheco’s “district includes Norwalk, Downey and Bell, where legendary scandals are Example 1 of why public records matter.”
Journalists and educational institutions would have received fee waivers, but should agencies decide who is a “real” journalist? In this online world, making that determination isn’t as easy as it sounds. As someone who was denied a Capitol press pass for sketchy reasons, I can only imagine the possibilities for mischief.
Public-records laws are designed to let citizens exert their democratic rights, not circumscribe them to suit the whims of officials. The Brown Act, which governs public meetings, declares the people “do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know.” Apparently, the secrecy queen and her government courtiers know better.
Pacheco recently relented and wants to revert to the Assembly-passed measure. The Senate Judiciary Committee then passed the scaled-back version. Sorry, but senators should reject this entire disreputable measure and put the kibosh on these anti-democratic efforts.
Steven Greenhut is a member of the Southern California News Group editorial board. Write to him at stevengreenhut@gmail.com.