Pocket Change: Public records acting up

California places a high value on government transparency.

With its Public Records Act being one of the strongest in the nation, all government records are required to be released to the public upon request – barring an exception such as attorney-client confidentiality.

It’s what separates public agencies from being prone to disasters like Enron.

But it comes at a cost.

San Diego is, of course, bound by this law, and generally fulfills requests in a timely manner. But economic hardships are causing requests to take longer to process.

When a request is made to a public relations officer, it is generally sent to the Mayor’s press office to be processed. A layoff in the Mayor’s office last fall has caused further delays and problems in requests in the PRA system.

This is just one of the tangible affects of budget problems at a local level. Expect to see more.

The Mayor’s office will be hiring a part-time contract employee to help with PRA requests from now on. The employee will be compensated $15 an hour and will work 25 hours a week according to The San Diego Union-Tribune. The total cost of the PRA system is roughly $350,000.

Is government transparency worth the costs?

The resident Pocket Change commentators give their take on PRAs:

Murtaza Baxamusa, Ph.D., AICP, director of Research and Policy, Center on Policy Initiatives:

One of the most significant embarrassments of public service istransparency — the government truly does not have much to hide behind. Transparency is the ability of anybody, anytime to peer into the privacy of any public employee, which is unparalleled in the private sector. Everything from how much the employee makes, to how she does her work is public record. The naked intrusiveness of Public Record Act (PRA) requests in regular business would make major corporations and their executives blush.

Nevertheless, transparency is also the lifeblood of governance. It is the stream that delivers our public dollars with accountability, and ensures the vitality and purity of the public system. It is what differentiates the public from the private, emphasizing that which is in the commons, and thus accessible by all. Therefore, state law requires all information in the performance of public work be available to anybody for the nominal cost of copying the information. California law is one of the most stringent laws on public access, even prohibiting the public agency from recovering attorney fees for records information that the agency withheld, and prevailed in court.

The cost of less than half a million dollars to perform this service in the city of San Diego — for a $3 billion organization — is reasonable. The inconvenience to employees is bearable. And the embarrassing stories that come out of PRA requests are justifiable. But the real danger lies in the part of the iceberg underneath the surface, consisting of public work performed by private government contractors, where the light of PRA requests fails to reach.

Erik Bruvold, founding president of the National University System Institute for Policy Research:

Money invested in complying in Public Records Act requests is money extremely well spent. Throughout the country there is a growing awareness of the value that transparency can have in improving government services and in increasing trust between citizens and their government. This movement goes far beyond simply looking at emails but seeks to get the checkbook of government “on-line” so that people can see just how government is spending their money. We think (the additional PRA hire) is long overdue in San Diego.

Steven Bartholow is SDNN’s multimedia editor and political reporter.

Tags: California, FOIA, government, Mayor Jerry Sanders, pra, public records, public records act, san diego mayor's office, san diego public records act, SDNN, transparent, Uncategorized

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Pocket Change . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.