Re “Nachbar Says Culver City Won’t Alter Public Records Request Stance”
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Governor Brown. Photo, thinkprogress.org.
Reviewing an array of conflicting conclusions one day after Gov. Brown’s attempted gutting of the state’s 45-year-old Public Records Act became public, it appears his stealthy move will prevail.
This is the latest loud hint that government can be trusted as much as any sleeping 2-year-old with a burning candle in each hand.
Despite outcries from the top of California to the bottom yesterday, those who know Mr. Brown best are confident this morning he soon will sign Assembly Bill 76, which will reduce the emasculated sunshine law to a string of drool, a punchline.
Mr. Brown’s mumbled, mysteriously irrational assertion that the changes are being made to save the state money, carries the identical moral weight of arguing that you are killing your spouse tonight, before dinner, to reduce the family’s burdensome weekly grocery bill.
Fingering the Culprits
Swearing legislators to secrecy months ago, Gov. Brown last winter embraced proposals by his notorious, suddenly arrogantly powerful Dept. of Finance:
• Governments no longer will be required to respond within 10 days to public records requests.
• Requests may be flatly denied without explanation.
• Since another provision holds that agencies no longer will be able to bill Sacramento for reimbursement of the cost of producing documents, those requests that are fulfilled may be of highly questionable quality.
Assembly Speaker John Perez, rocked yesterday by the huge blowback, quickly promised that the Assembly would re-visit the main softening proposals and re-muscle them. But he was immediately stifled by Senate Majority Leader Darrell Steinberg and the governor. After Mr. Brown signs the bill into law, the impotent Public Records Act will possess all the energy of a corpse from 1492.
Chances are very good that those persons seeking government documents from City Hall, the domain of City Manager John Nachbar and Asst. City Manager Martin Cole, still will be favorably received – without any interruption in the way they do business. Mr. Nachbar made this promise here yesterday.
In this morning’s Sacramento Bee, longtime essayist Dan Walters isolates one bullseye point, that journalists heavily rely on the act to obtain obsessively squirreled away government documents:
“What goes around, comes around.
“A state budget trailer bill now awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown's signature would eviscerate the California Public Records Act, a long-standing sunshine law that allows the press and public to access most state and local government documents.
“Journalists use the CPRA to uncover official malfeasance. The Los Angeles Times employed it, for example, to ferret out the outrageous self-dealing in the small city of Bell, resulting in criminal trials.
“Capitol journalists, including those at The Bee, use it to seek documents from state agencies that self-protective officials may not want the public to see, such as The Bee's disclosures about funds being hidden in the Department of Parks and Recreation.
“The trailer bill, Assembly Bill 76, is a catch-all of legal changes supposedly related to the budget.
“One provision, in the words of a legislative analysis, ‘recasts the CPRA mandate provisions as optional best practices, and requires a local government to either comply with these best practices or announce at its first regularly scheduled public meeting (and annually thereafter) that the local government will not meet the best practices.’”
