San Diego City Council members expressed initial support Wednesday for a new Office of Transparency designed to vastly improve what’s seen as the city’s sluggish response to requests for public records, but they also agreed such a proposal warrants further study of the costs involved before it can move forward.
In a meeting Wednesday of the council’s Rules Committee, San Diego City Atty. Mara Elliott presented a proposal for the new office, which she says is needed to address some of the problematic issues her office discovered following a two-year study of the city’s current system for responding to formal public records requests.
It can be a clanky mechanism, she said, that is sometimes inaccurate and inconsistent in its application. Elliott is recommending centralizing all open records requests via a new office. Elliott’s chief deputy Karen Li began studying the issue in 2021 when she was asked to “focus on how we could do a better job as a city,” Elliott said.
“Our city’s biggest challenge is a lack of a coordinated response process,” she said. “Those inconsistencies may go unaddressed, putting the city at a disadvantage in litigation.”
And there is a penalty for ineffective or poorly executed responses, she pointed out.
“Failure to comply with the PRA can be costly,” she said. Between 2019 an 2023, Elliott said her office handled 36 PRA cases, resulting in $483,168.20 in payouts either through settlement or attorney fee awards.”
Council President Pro Tem Joe LaCava recalled when he first entered public office he was “surprised by how fragmented the process is.”
But he also voiced some concern about the potential costs.
“I’m a little nervous about whether some of the predicted savings actually can become captured into funding a new office or new positions,” he said.
Elliott said she believes it’s possible to make her proposal budget neutral by using in-house employees if an effort is made to reorganize and train staff.
The committee ultimately voted unanimously to have the City Attorney’s office confer with the city’s Independent Budget Analyst to confirm whether the proposed transparency initiative is “budget-neutral.” It also wants them to look into the best way for implementing the proposal. The matter will then return to the Rules Committee for further consideration, the committee agreed.
Council member Vivian Moreno said she has had concerns for some time about the city’s system for responding to public records requests. She thinks the city’s Outlook email system combined with the ‘Next Request’ system used by the city may not “efficiently respond to the public records request” and is “unnecessarily cumbersome.”
She recalled one records request when “Outlook crashed five times causing all work to be lost, and requiring council aide liaisons to start from scratch.” She said “the IT department needs to look at this entire process from beginning to end.”
From outside city government, the process is “incredibly difficult,” said Clifford Weller, a retired public sector attorney with 40-plus years of experience.
“Any entity especially at this size needs a central office to coordinate the process,” he told the Rules Committee.
San Diego is on track to process up to 10,000 records requests by the end of the calendar year, according to data provided in the City Attorney’s report, which represents a huge increase over the past decade.
Elliott proposes “creating a new office that would receive, assign and respond” to requests. “The function, she said, could also be placed within an existing department.”
Her report revealed there are several different response systems used by the city and there is a repeated problem of lack of communication among various departments that may be responding to the same request for information. It could be a case where one city agency might be able to provide one answer and another agency refused to answer because they felt it was, for example, a personnel issue and not releasable. This in turn creates mistrust among the public, and for city employees it’s a burden of anxiety,
She noted that most inquiries are about crime or development on our streets or a nuisance property located near their child’s school, or whether neighborhood businesses are registered with the city.
But even simple requests get tangled up in the system. No one, she said, wants to “wait for months to get this information nor should they and they also want to know that the records we produced are comprehensive and accurate. If we hold records from production, they want to understand why.”