HomeMy WebLinkAboutAB 1821 (Pacheco) CA Public Records Act - Response Time - City of SLO - SUPPORTCity of San Luis Obispo, Office of the City Council, 990 Palm Street, San Luis Obispo, CA, 93401-3249, 805.781.7114,
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April 15, 2026
The Honorable Ash Kalra
Chair, Senate Judiciary Committee
1020 N Street, Room 104
Sacramento, CA 95814
RE: AB 1821 (Pacheco) – California Public Records Act: agency response time (SUPPORT)
Dear Chair Kalra,
The City of San Luis Obispo (City) strongly supports AB 1821 (Pacheco), which provides a practical
and necessary clarification to response timelines under the California Public Records Act (CPRA).
Transparency and public access to government records are core values for our city. We are
committed to responding to CPRA requests as promptly and thoroughly as possible while continuing
to deliver essential services to our community.
In recent years, the City has experienced a steady increase in the volume, scope and complexity of
public records requests. These requests often require extensive searches across multiple
departments and formats, including emails, text messages, and digital files, as well as careful review
and redaction of sensitive or legally protected information. In 2025, the City received 489 Public
Records Act requests, and the City Attorney’s Office produced over 62,000 pages of records. Staff
estimate that for every page produced, at least 20 pages must be reviewed. For example, in 2025, a
single request required the review of more than 31,000 emails. The City is also experiencing an
increasing volume of resource intensive requests that appear to be for narrow commercial or private
financial benefit at the cost of resources funded to serve an entire community, and we are seeing an
escalation in requests that seem to be AI generated or assisted and/or calculated to aggregate public
information for private AI development purposes.
These efforts are highly resource-intensive and must be completed by staff during regular business
hours. Every hour spent responding to Public Records Act requests is an hour of staff time that could
otherwise be used to support core City services and community priorities. Like many cities in
California, the City of San Luis Obispo is also experiencing slowing revenue growth and increasing
budget pressures, making it more challenging to maintain existing service levels while meeting
growing administrative demands.
AB 1821’s clarification to use “business days” rather than “calendar days” for initial determinations
and extensions better aligns statutory timelines with the operational realities of public agencies and
is a welcome, if only incremental, step toward mitigating the significant impacts of increasingly
cumbersome requests on increasingly strained public resources. City staff are not available on
weekends or holidays, and the bill ensures agencies have the full, intended number of working days
to conduct thorough and accurate searches. This is particularly important when responding to
complex or voluminous requests, coordinating across departments, or addressing circumstances
such as system disruptions or emergencies, as recognized in the bill. It is also important given the
potential litigation and financial consequences that can further burden public resources if an agency’s
resource constraints result in delays or errors in production of records.
This narrowly tailored update does not reduce public access, but instead improves agencies’ ability
to provide timely, accurate, and complete responses consistent with the intent of the CPRA. For these
reasons, the City of San Luis Obispo strongly supports AB 1821, respectfully requests your AYE vote
on the bill. The City further requests your continued focus on legislative means by which to balance
our shared commitment to public transparency with the realities of for-profit commercial use of the
CPRA for private benefit at substantial costs to public resources.
Sincerely,
Erica A. Stewart
Mayor
City of San Luis Obispo
cc: The Honorable Blanca Pacheco, Member, California State Assembly
Members, Senate Judiciary Committee
Members of the San Luis Obispo City Council
Senator John Laird
Assemblymember Dawn Addis
Dave Mullinax, League of California Cities
League of California Cities, cityletters@cacities.org