Opinion: How Californians defended the Public Records Act

How The Public Records Act Was Saved

The California Public Records Act is 58 years old. It almost didn’t make it to its 59th birthday.

The California Public Records Act, or CPRA, is what lets you ask to see a copy of any document or record kept by a city, county or state agency, including contracts, reports, audits, and even emails between government employees. It is the state-level equivalent of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). 

CPRA isn’t perfect and has its fair share of exemptions, including those to protect personal privacy, litigation and investigations in process, proprietary business secrets, and even national security, but California’s law has long been recognized as one of the best in the country. 

It has even been improved from time to time, for example, when then-State Senator Nancy Skinner expanded it to cover incidents of proven police misconduct.

CPRA works so well that according to the California State Association of Counties, the quantity of public records requests keeps rising. If you are an advocate for transparency that believes government business belongs to the people, that’s great news. But many local governments, and one Orange County assemblymember, Blanca Pacheco, didn’t think so.

Egged on by lobbyists for local government, Pacheco spent most of the 2026 state legislative session trying to destroy the CPRA with Assembly Bill 1821. Her first idea was to charge fees to “commercial” requesters, including an “administrative fee” of $22.35/hour and a “search fee” of $66.26/hour, with only three narrow exemptions for 

1. scientific research organizations 
2. government agencies 
3. journalists affiliated with news media. 

That doesn’t include you, and it doesn’t include me. In short, that turned a transparency process based on the responsibility of government to report to taxpayers into a profit center for selling public records back to the public.

When that proposal got pushed back in April, Pacheco wasn’t through. She came back in June with an even worse proposal. This time, local agencies would be empowered to label some public records requests as “malicious” – with no definition of the term – and drag the requester into court. This meant anyone who asked for a public record using the law could find themselves, for no particular reason, forced to defend themselves in court against a charge of malicious intent. This is called a “chilling effect” because it intimidates people from filing requests at all. 

But happily, it didn’t work. An enormous public outcry ensued. Civil rights and transparency groups like the First Amendment Coalition, Oakland Privacy, ACLU, League of Women Voters and Common Cause mobilized. On the other side of the political divide, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association was just as upset. The Orange County Register, Pacheco’s hometown newspaper, blasted her in an editorial board opinion, and articles ran in statewide publications. Our group even got a call from a journalist in North Carolina wanting to know about this crazy bill in California. 

All of the attention forced the Senate Judiciary committee to review the bill to do so under the glare of publicity. In a back door negotiation, the committee and Pacheco came to an agreement to whittle the bill down to a small increase in the amount of time agencies have to acknowledge a request from 10 calendar days to 10 business days. Possible extensions may change from 10 calendar days to 10 business days. 

Why was this effort so successful? Those who follow the state legislative process will assure you that there are lots of proposals that seem misguided. And many of them roll along with little to no attention paid. 

But the California Public Records Act is different. It is useful to so many different constituencies, from families wanting to know what happened in a lethal law enforcement encounter to neighbors wanting to understand zoning decisions, to anti-surveillance groups cracking the code on Flock. The CPRA provides access to information that can’t be obtained in any other way. 

So here’s to the California Public Records Act reaching its 59th birthday. 

Stay vigilant. We expect that the forces behind AB 1821 will be back, and we need all of you to protect this vital law. You may not know now when you or someone close to you will need to use it, but that time will come. It is up to all of us to ensure the CPRA will still be there.

Editor’s Note: As of July 14, AB 1821 remains active in the Senate. The fee, designated-submission and “malicious intent” provisions were removed, while the response-time extension remains. The bill goes to the Senate Appropriations Committee on Aug. 3.