Shasta County Fifth in CA to Rescind Records Fee Ordinance
The Shasta County Board of Supervisors has voted unanimously to rescind a 2021 ordinance that charged residents for researching and locating documents. Interestingly, this is now the fifth county in the state that has passed and repealed an ordinance related to public records fees.
The vote to rescind comes after the ACLU and California First Amendment Coalition sent information to the county last year indicating that the ordinance violates state law.
The legal justification being referenced comes from the 2020 California Supreme Court decision in National Lawyers Guild, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter v. City of Hayward. The decision strictly limited costs to the public for electronic records requests and reiterated the purposes of the California Public Records Act (CPRA).
The CPRA, which has been law since 1981, allowed charges for the direct cost of creating records, like running a copy machine, but not for the work of finding the file. In 2000, the law was amended to limit charges to the direct cost of producing a copy of an electronic record, but included some exceptions for data compilation and extraction.
These exceptions were cited by the City of Hayward in their decision to charge the National Lawyers Guild for redacting the police videos they had requested. In 2018, an appellate court agreed, citing the different rules for electronic records. The 2020 Hayward case reversed this decision, more narrowly defining what an exemption for extraction is supposed to be: “‘extraction’ does not cover every process that might be colloquially described as ‘taking information out.’ It does not, for example, cover time spent searching for responsive records in an e-mail inbox or a computer’s documents folder. Just as agencies cannot recover the costs of searching through a filing cabinet for paper records, they cannot recover comparable costs for electronic records. Nor, for similar reasons, does ‘extraction’ cover the cost of redacting exempt data from otherwise producible electronic records.”
Since the cost ordinances were passed after the Hayward decision, it’s unclear whether county officials were ignorant of the law or were trying to test its boundaries. Regardless of intentions, the First Amendment Coalition has been fighting these ordinances with the ACLU after identifying eight counties charging for records that shouldn’t be. They’ve been teaming up with local news groups that have been charged these fees in the course of their research. In Shasta County, the Shasta Scout was asked for nearly $5,000 to produce emails over a six-month period containing six keywords, spurring the challenge to the ordinance.
Laws like the CPRA are important because they ensure equal access to documents that are supposed to be available for citizens. It removes barriers that can stifle requests and allows the press to freely report on important matters for the local community and beyond.
Redaction can be a difficult process, but it’s a crucial piece of records access and helps protect residents by removing personally identifiable information like social security numbers and dates of birth or sensitive information like the names of victims and minors.
Extract automates this process in government agencies like courts and land records offices. The software knows what type of document it’s looking at, what type of sensitive information it should be looking for, and uses configured context clues, location data, and rules to increase accuracy over and above what traditional find and replace tools can deliver. If you’re interested in learning more, you can find more information about our redaction software here.
