California’s Quiet War on Public Records

Earlier this month, government agencies in California came close to acquiring a power they had spent months trying to obtain — and then, after a wave of opposition, the bill’s author agreed to give it up.

The provision, buried in Assembly Bill 1821, would have allowed state and local agencies to petition a superior court to find that a public records request was submitted with “malicious intent.” If the court agreed, the agency could impose fees on the requester for its search and review time. The agency under scrutiny would have decided whether to pursue you. You would have found out when the court summons arrived.

The people most at risk were the ones Garry’s List exists to support: the journalists, watchdog organizations, and civic advocates who use public records requests to surface what government agencies would prefer stayed hidden. They are also the ones who caught the provision and forced it back out.

On June 25, Pacheco backed down. Her chief of staff, Nikki Johnson, confirmed to Voice of OC that — after conversations with colleagues and “for a number of reasons” — the bill would revert to the earlier version heard by the Assembly Judiciary Committee, dropping the fees, the commercial-use classification, and the court-petition power. That narrower version makes one substantive change to the Public Records Act: it shifts an agency’s initial response time from 10 calendar days to 10 business days, with an additional 14 business days allowed under “unusual circumstances.” The rollback is carried out through the committee process rather than in a single stroke, but the author’s commitment to pull the controversial provisions was explicit.

What AB 1821 Tried To Do

AB 1821 was introduced by Assemblymember Blanca Pacheco, and its most recent amendments were co-written by the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties — the lobbying organizations that represent the very agencies subject to public records requests. The groups that advocate for local government helped write legislation to shield local government from scrutiny.

The malicious-intent provision was its sharpest edge. It arrived through a quiet procedural path: the controversial provisions were stripped before the Assembly floor vote, a clean bill passed the Assembly 55–12 on May 27, and the provisions were then reinserted as Senate amendments on June 10. The version with the court-petition power never faced a full Assembly vote; it was added only after the bill reached the Senate. Pacheco’s staff have told the Oaklandside that Senate Judiciary Committee staff were alerted to the direction of the amendments — but the substance of what was coming had not been litigated on the Assembly floor, where most members approved what Pacheco described as a “modest change.”

Who Caught It

The people who sounded the alarm are the same people the provision was designed to deter.

David Snyder of the First Amendment Coalition testified against the bill and published a detailed critique of the Senate amendments, warning that the provision would let agencies haul people into court for the simple act of submitting a Public Records Act request and would create a significant chilling effect on the public’s willingness to file requests at all. His organization exists to defend exactly the kind of accountability reporting this bill would have burdened.

Tracy Rosenberg of Oakland Privacy, the watchdog group’s advocacy director, described the proposal as a serious threat to the investigative work that public records law was written to empower — and precisely the kind of work the malicious-intent provision would have exposed to court proceedings. Oakland Privacy is the kind of civic watchdog the Public Records Act exists to support.

News organizations across the state covered the bill. CalMatters reported the measure could make California “the most secretive state in the country.” The Oaklandside and Voice of OC detailed local impacts. These are outlets doing exactly the work the bill’s authors wanted to make riskier. Their coverage created pressure the bill’s backers could not absorb. An opposition letter signed by 19 organizations — including the First Amendment Coalition, ACLU California Action, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association — went to the Senate Judiciary Committee urging it to reject the bill.

For nearly six decades, the California Public Records Act has guaranteed Californians the right to see how their government operates. That right is only meaningful if the people willing to exercise it — reporters, watchdog groups, civic organizations, individual residents — can do so without facing court proceedings and financial penalties initiated by the agencies they are scrutinizing.

Transparency advocates noted that existing California law already allows agencies to reject genuinely burdensome requests. The malicious-intent provision was not a fix to a missing power. It was a mechanism to make asking questions expensive for the people most likely to ask them. It is being removed because those same people were watching.

The Trend Against Transparency

AB 1821 is the most visible recent example, but it is not the only bill this session that expands what government can shield from public view.

Assembly Bill 2624, authored by Assemblymember Mia Bonta, extends California’s Safe at Home address confidentiality program to immigration support services providers. On its surface the goal is protecting workers from harassment — a legitimate concern. But the bill also creates civil and criminal penalties — with starting fines of at least $4,000 — and at least one state senator has warned it raises “serious First Amendment concerns” by restricting truthful, lawfully obtained information and creating penalties tied to the content of speech rather than to unlawful conduct. It passed the Assembly 57–19 and is currently in the Senate Judiciary Committee — the same committee reviewing AB 1821.

Together these bills illustrate a pattern: each session, legislation expands what government and government-adjacent institutions can put beyond the reach of records requests and public scrutiny. Each bill arrives with a sympathetic justification. The cumulative effect, if left unchecked, is a government that becomes steadily harder to see inside.

The Fight for Accountability

The reversal landed just ahead of the bill’s next stop: the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up AB 1821 at a June 30 hearing, where it will consider the reverted, narrower version rather than the fee-and-court-petition language that drew the opposition. A committee hearing is not the finish line — the bill would still need to clear the committee, pass the full Senate, return to the Assembly for concurrence, and be signed by the Governor, with the Legislature’s deadline to send bills to his desk at the end of August. But the provisions that alarmed transparency advocates are, by the author’s own account, no longer part of the bill heading into that hearing.

Even in its narrowed form, AB 1821 changes the response timeline from 10 calendar days to 10 business days, with an additional 14-business-day extension available under “unusual circumstances” — effectively widening the window agencies have to respond. That provision remains. AB 2624 is still moving through the Senate. The League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties are still co-authoring legislation. The incentive to make accountability harder has not changed.

Garry’s List exists to uplift the people doing this work: the journalists filing records requests at city hall, the watchdog organizations tracking how public money gets spent, the civic advocates who show up to committee hearings and read the amendments. They are the ones who found the malicious-intent provision, named it publicly, and pushed until the author agreed to pull it. They are also the ones who would have been its primary targets.

When those voices are supported, protected, and amplified, provisions like this one get removed before they become law. The accountability loop closed on AB 1821. It won’t always. That’s why the people doing this work need to keep doing it — and why supporting them is not optional.