Want government records? This California lawmaker wants you to pay more for them

Want to know what your government is up to? Be prepared to pay up.

A California state lawmaker wants to 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. The proposal is raising concerns among transparency advocates that the fees could deter Californians from accessing records they are constitutionally entitled to.

Assembly Bill 1821, authored by Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco, a Downey Democrat, would also allow the charge if government workers spend more than 10 hours within a month looking for documents requested by the same person. The proposal would apply to most people, with exemptions for journalists and educational or scientific institutions.

In a statement responding to CalMatters’ questions, Pacheco said public agencies have had to spend substantial time responding to a spike in the volume and scope of records requests.

“This bill is intended to address a narrow set of high-cost, resource-intensive requests that can delay agencies’ ability to respond to other records requests,” she said. “The goal is to ensure that agencies can continue to respond to all requests in a timely manner.”

The measure follows years of local government complaints that fulfilling extensive, sometimes duplicative records requests can be so time-consuming that it distracts government staff from other vital tasks, such as performing health insurance eligibility checks, responding to homeless encampments or conducting elections.

“The growing volume and complexity of requests creates real challenges for local governments — straining limited public resources,” said Ben Adler, spokesperson for the California State Association of Counties, which has not taken an official stance on the bill.

It becomes even more difficult for governments when someone “disgruntled” or “unreasonable” files requests maliciously, an attorney who represented public agencies in California wrote in a 2023 op-ed.

Pacheco said in her statement that one person submitted more than 100 records requests in the city of Fontana and stated that their goal was to disrupt city operations, resulting in more than $300,000 in legal and staffing costs. Another request received in Chula Vista, she said, could require 150 to 300 staff hours to fulfill.

“Requests of this size consume a disproportionate share of public resources and delay agencies’ ability to respond to other requests.”

Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco in the Assembly in Sacramento on March 13, 2025.

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Fred Greaves

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CalMatters

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But agencies already try to charge astronomical fees for public records, which has a chilling effect on the public’s right to know because “for most people … $100 is going to be too much,” said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.

Applying the charge to most Californians threatens their constitutional right to government information, Snyder said.

“The California Constitution says that it’s a fundamental … right of everybody in this state to obtain records from their public agencies,” he said. “The underlying principle is that the government’s records are the people’s records. The government serves the people; not the other way around.”

State law allows public agencies to charge fees for making copies of public records but not for the time spent searching, reviewing or redacting them. In 2020, the California Supreme Court concluded that governments cannot charge for search and redaction and said such costs would undermine Californians’ right to access.

“Just as agencies cannot recover the costs of searching through a filing cabinet for paper records, they cannot recover comparable costs for electronic records,” the ruling said. “Even if higher costs to the agency mean slower disclosure rates or greater inconvenience to the requester, these burdens on access are insignificant if the alternative is no access at all.”

But several local governments tried to charge those fees anyway. Shasta County, for example, adopted an ordinance in January 2021 to charge $25 an hour for staff to find, review and redact records. A year later, Mendocino County established regulations to charge up to $150 an hour, in one case sending a local journalist an $84,000 bill. Both counties only repealed their ordinances after drawing widespread criticism and litigation threats from journalists and First Amendment advocates.

Under Pacheco’s measure, they wouldn’t have had to.

What is a 'reasonable' charge?

The measure would require the rates agencies charge for records searches to be “reasonable.” But without a dollar amount cap, that guardrail is meaningless, Snyder said.

“If it’s a large volume of body cam footage, that could be many, many, many hours of review time,” he said. “And if agencies are charging hourly, let’s say $100 an hour, you can see how those numbers can go up really fast.”

The proposal also doesn’t say who would determine what is a reasonable amount of time necessary to search and review records, which could further empower public agencies to justify expensive fees, Snyder said.

“It leaves an enormous range of variables up to agency discretion,” he said. “Many agencies unfortunately behave in a way that suggests that their goal is to not produce the records asked for.”

The measure would additionally give agencies more time to respond to and fulfill requests: While state law requires agencies to tell the requestor what’s disclosable within 10 calendar days and allows them to extend that deadline by no more than 14 calendar days, Pacheco’s measure would prolong those periods to 10 and 14 business days, respectively.

Pacheco said she will amend the bill to ensure it is “narrowly tailored” to establish “appropriate thresholds” for charging for public records, although she did not elaborate on what those thresholds would be.

Pacheco has pushed for several measures to limit disclosure requirements in recent years, including a law last year that made it easier for agencies to redact police misconduct records and another that allowed more public officials to withhold personally identifying information.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.