Sacramento’s Newest Trick: Making You Pay to Watch Them

The California Public Records Act turns 58 this year. It was born from a simple premise: the government works for the people, and the people have a right to see what their government is doing. For nearly six decades, that premise has held. Assembly Bill 1821 would end it.

Assemblywoman Blanca Pacheco (D-Downey) introduced AB 1821 in February, ostensibly to help local governments manage what she calls a “growing strain” from complex or commercially motivated records requests. That is a real problem worth solving. What she has proposed, however, is not a solution — it is a bureaucratic self-preservation scheme dressed up as administrative reform.

Here is what the bill does in its current form. It converts response timelines from calendar days to business days, quietly adding nearly two weeks of delay to requests that are already frequently stonewalled. It allows agencies to charge between $22 and $66 per hour for searching and reviewing records they deem to be for “commercial use.” It requires requesters to use only designated submission channels; anything submitted by fax, mail, or an online portal outside the designated system is deemed “not properly requested,” and no response timelines apply. And it would make California the first state in the nation to explicitly authorize agencies to petition a superior court to determine whether a request was submitted with “malicious intent” with the ability to sue the requester and impose fees if the court agrees.

I have spent three decades in investment management and financial services. I have filed more than a few public records requests in my time, including in my role as a designated expert witness in federal and state courts. I know the difference between a legitimate administrative burden and a mechanism designed to discourage inconvenient scrutiny. AB 1821 is the latter.

The bill’s co-authors are the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties — the very entities whose records would be subject to greater scrutiny. That should tell you everything about whose interests this legislation serves. When the regulated write their own rules, you can predict the outcome.

The “malicious intent” provision is particularly cynical. The term is vague enough to cover almost any aggressive or persistent request that makes an agency uncomfortable. The California Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that charging fees for searching and reviewing records threatens Californians’ right to access. Pacheco’s bill routes around that ruling by attaching the fees to a judicial finding of “malice” a workaround that invites litigation abuse and would chill legitimate inquiry. The First Amendment Coalition has called the lawsuit provision the most damaging element of the bill. That assessment is correct.

What makes this especially troubling is how the bill moved. Pacheco diluted AB 1821 to pass the Assembly in May — removing the controversial fee and lawsuit provisions to get it through. The moment it cleared the chamber, she added those provisions back in the Senate, in more restrictive form than before. Tracy Rosenberg of Oakland Privacy called the result “a virtual horror show of governmental non-transparency.” That phrasing is dramatic, but the observation is not wrong. Legislators who gut a bill to secure Assembly votes and then restore the gutted provisions in the Senate are not negotiating in good faith. They are running a procedural shell game.

The irony is that California already has tools to address genuinely burdensome requests. Agencies can seek relief through the courts when requests are overbroad. The problem is that most agencies have not used those tools aggressively because doing so is expensive and the results are unpredictable. AB 1821 offers something more attractive: the ability to impose financial barriers and delay timelines across the board, while reserving the harshest penalties for anyone bold enough to ask questions the agency finds inconvenient.

Government transparency is not a partisan issue. It is a structural one. When agencies control access to their own records, accountability erodes. That is true in Sacramento, it is true in Washington, and it is true in every city hall in California. The public records law is one of the few mechanisms ordinary citizens — and reporters, and watchdogs, and expert witnesses — have to verify that the people running government are doing their jobs honestly.

AB 1821 is still in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Governor Newsom has not taken a public position. He should veto it if it reaches his desk. Sunlight, as Justice Brandeis noted, remains the best disinfectant. Sacramento should stop trying to draw the curtains.