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Oakland officials took months to release routine public records about the Ghost Ship fire that killed 36 people.
(Paul Kuroda)
Oakland officials took months to release routine public records about the Ghost Ship fire that killed 36 people. (Paul Kuroda)

If you’ve ever filed a California Public Records Act request, you’ll understand why a reform bill that Assemblyman Ron Bonta, D-Alameda, has introduced is so important.

Assembly Bill 1479 creates a civil penalty of up to $5,000 for public agencies if a court finds that “bad-faith non-compliance” with the law has occurred.

The Assembly Judiciary Committee approved the bill on an 11-0 vote April 25. People who were present tell me its members were clearly on transparency’s side and had little sympathy for the arguments of opponents, which include the California League of Cities and the Association of Counties.

Delays are everywhere. They occur in two ways: Delayed responses and badly delayed production of records.

Agencies don’t abide by the act’s requirements to make a determination within 10 days describing what records are response to a request and what might be withheld or censored. An extension of 14 days is allowed to make that determination only if “unusual circumstances” exist.

Instead, an agency will respond on the 10th day with something like “to the extent that disclosable records exist they will be made available.” That’s a punt, not a determination. They are getting away with waiting until the 10th or 24th day and then blowing the request far into the future. That is far from good faith.

And once the determination is made, there is nothing in the act that mandates exactly when records must be disclosed. It calls, simply, for them to be released “promptly.”

Prompt dates to the Latin word promptus, meaning “brought to light.” Webster’s defines it as “quick to act or do what is required; ready, punctual…. Done, spoken etc., at once or without delay.”

In California bureaucraticese it means entirely something else. At the secretive and recalcitrant office of University of California President Janet Napolitano, it means taking more than 15 months to provide records about sexual misconduct on UC campuses.

In Southern California, the ACLU sued the Los Angeles Police Department on April 24, alleging that requests go systematically unanswered for months or completely ignored. Bay Area journalist Ali Winston, specializes in deep digs on police department, is also a plaintiff in the suit.

In Oakland, it means months of stalling to provide routine records for police and fire calls, which happened after the devastating Ghost Ship fire. Mayor Libby  Schaaf’s administration even slammed the lid on routine, over-the-counter records, such as code enforcement actions related the fire.

Oakland is a good example of why the teeth in Bonta’s bill are so needed. There can be little doubt that the release of records related to both the Ghost Ship fire, which killed 36 people, and the March 27 fire at a San Pablo Avenue building where four people died, were manipulated by Schaaf’s people in an incredibly unwise attempt to manage news stories.

The city’s administrator, Sabrena Landrith, said at an early December news conference that police records would be provided immediately. There is no way she says that without knowing, exactly, where the records stand.

Yet in February, when the records still hadn’t been provided, we had to publicly announce that we’d sue to get them if they weren’t coughed up. Presto, there they were, neat and ready after two months of delays.  How that doesn’t fit the definition of “bad-faith non-compliance” is beyond me.

And it isn’t just those records. On Feb. 17, in the midst of writing a news story, I asked a city flack, Harry Hamilton, for the name of a company the city had contracted with and the related contract, a very simple matter that should have resulted in immediate disclosure, or at least the next day.

Hamilton replied “… the documents are currently under review. Once the contract has been reviewed and any necessary redactions completed, we’ll share it with you.” He treated this like a records request, but of course then failed to follow the law’s requirements. Two months later, no documents, no anything.

Bonta’s bill needs the teeth of a great white shark. And while it will never happen, it should make government employees pay the penalties for failing to act on requests in good faith out of their own pockets.