Records requests in Costa Mesa at all-time high

Requests for public records in politically charged Costa Mesa have skyrocketed to an all-time high, costing the city thousands of dollars and stretching the resources of the city clerk’s office, according to interviews and documents reviewed by the Daily Pilot.

But the rise in requests for information, say those who have filed many of them, stems from a mistrust of government, the ease of requesting information in the digital age and the fact that the city that does not make enough documents available online.

Costa Mesa City Hall logged a record 613 public records requests in 2014 — a 73% jump from the 354 the year before. As recently as 2008, there were only 40.

An upward trend began in 2010, when political animus split the council into two ideologically opposed camps. Since then, scores of people started requesting increasing amounts of information.

“The level of distrust of City Hall is greater,” said Councilwoman Sandy Genis. “That makes people more anxious about looking at city documents and makes them more tenacious.”

City officials counter that they have been putting considerable amounts of public information online in recent years and spending considerable man hours locating records.

“We’re spending a lot of money being responsible to these requests,” said Assistant City CEO Rick Francis. “I think we’re going above and beyond compared to what a lot of other public agencies go through.”

Still, residents, journalists, activists, lawyers and anyone else who wants to review receipts, legal bills, emails, invoices and other documents that aren’t easily accessed online are legally entitled to invoke the California Public Records Act to get them.

For example, according to the city clerk’s log, Costa Mesa resident Terri Fuqua asked in July 2014 for credit and debit card purchases made by a host of city officials since 2001. The request was later condensed to fewer years and only one official.

“You need to know what it’s for, who all was there and what the purpose of the lunch was,” Fuqua said. “That’s the way businesses run. You don’t say, ‘I’m going out to lunch on the taxpayers’ dollar’ and put no reason for it.”

Though all cities handle public records requests, it appears that, considering its population, Costa Mesa’s records are more highly sought after.

Three Orange County cities with significantly larger populations than Costa Mesa’s 112,000 — county seat Santa Ana (334,000), Garden Grove (175,000) and Anaheim (345,000) — had nearly the same number of public records requests in 2014.

Anaheim, the most populous city in the county, processed around 600 requests, or 13 fewer than Costa Mesa. Santa Ana logged a couple dozen more, around 630.

Garden Grove had 600. Fullerton (139,00) had 520 and Newport Beach (87,000) logged 400.

Comparisons of public records requests among cities are imprecise, experts note. Each city clerk’s office logs requests differently, sometimes not tracking orders that get quickly fulfilled over the phone or online. Some include police and fire department records.

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How requests are filled

City Clerk Brenda Green is the custodian of Costa Mesa’s public records. Her three subordinates and two part-time interns constitute the rest of what the staff characterizes as a “lean and mean” six-person group handling a massive workload that’s gotten only larger as the years go on.

In early 2014, city CEO Tom Hatch asked the council to let him hire another staffer for the overwhelmed city clerk’s office. Council members were told about the complexity of public records requests, some of which require that “multiple staff members spend days going through files to produce the required documents,” staff wrote in a report.

The council complied. An additional deputy city clerk was brought onboard at a cost of more than $100,000 annually for salary and benefits.

While the Internet has been a boon in terms of data dissemination, it has also contributed to the demand for increasing amounts of information. No longer do the curious have to walk into the clerk’s Fair Drive office and fill out paperwork. Since the process went online in mid-2012, most of the public records arrive digitally.

“You go in there, and there you are,” Genis said of the website’s “city transparency” tab. “You don’t have to find a stamp or anything.”

Of the 613 requests last year, 370, or 60%, were filed online. The rest arrived at the office by email, by in-person delivery or by phone.

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What’s being requested?

Costa Mesa City Hall has no library or hall of records containing organized stacks for leisurely perusal. Rather, after a record is sought, it’s up to the clerk’s staff to log the request and go about fulfilling it.

Each public records request is also copied to top city officials. While experts say this practice of informing so many officials about each request, big or small, may be unusual, staff members say it expedites the process. In their view, officials outside the clerk’s office may have better knowledge of where certain records are kept, and consequently can find those materials quicker.

Once the requested information is gathered, the interested party can view it without charge or, if it’s a small document that’s already been electronically scanned, ask that it be sent electronically. Fees are charged for printouts and computer discs.

The city clerk’s office can also charge for using staff time to compile information that hasn’t already been gathered into an easily digestible format — police calls made to a certain address, for example.

Many records, about two-thirds, are routine — building permits, meeting minutes — and easy to locate and distribute.

Other queries are related to hot-button items of the day: sober-living homes, litigation, Costa Mesa’s troubled 60th anniversary party — which went into the red — and Fairview Park, where debate continues over whether to build sports fields in the area’s natural environment.

Because of the complexity of those topics, finding relevant documents can take longer.

What additionally stretches the process, both financially and manpower-wise, is redacting confidential information, such as home addresses, confidential employee matters, details about minors or bank account numbers. Redacting is done, line by line, by clerk staffers or the city attorney’s office.

The latter, made up of outsourced help that charges $177 an hour, ends up costing taxpayers extra money — potentially in the tens thousands of dollars over the course of a year.

Beyond the six-figure compensation of the deputy city clerk hired to help meet the demand, the city could not provide an estimate on how much the surge in public records requests is costing City Hall.

Francis explained that the staff does devote a considerable amount of time to the process — which is only one function of the clerk’s office — and that the legal fees are adding up.

A type of request that often proves costly is the massive, nonspecific inquiry. Such requests seek “any and all” documents, memos and emails on any given topic over several years. The requested documents generally are spread over multiple city departments. Sometimes these requests are adversarial in nature, such as attorneys who are preparing to sue the city.

“Everything under the sun” record searches are more like “fishing expeditions,” where the requester is seeing what may pop up, said Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit organization working to advance free speech and open and accountable government.

He called the Public Records Act a “scarce resource” that isn’t “unlimited.”

The “fishing expedition approach” is “completely inappropriate for the Public Records Act,” Scheer said. “If everybody did that, the Public Records Act would be repealed. There’s no way to devote enough resources to be able to process such huge requests.”

Costa Mesa Mayor Steve Mensinger said that while civic transparency is important, “clearly some people abuse the process. The city has spent a considerable amount of resources in staffing up our clerk’s office in order to provide access and transparency to those that are requesting it.”

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Seekers say their motives are noble

The people who file information requests say that the public is entitled to such information, especially in a town with so much well-publicized distrust among union members, community activists and the City Council majority.

One such seeker is Anna Vrska. She filed 111 requests in 2014, about 18% of all requests in Costa Mesa last year.A majority of them were filed within a short period of time: 22 on Oct. 3, 33 on Nov. 17 and 22 on Nov. 24.

She says she is concerned that the city hasn’t been forthright with its constituents, that it has something to hide. Vrska maintains that she is exercising her right to look behind the curtain.

“I feel something’s wrong, so that’s why I keep digging,” Vrska said. “I wouldn’t just be doing this because I think it’s really fun. I think there is a problem.”

Vrska, who serves on the Fairview Park Citizens Advisory Committee, began by requesting information pertinent to her role, namely citywide sports field usage. She wanted solid facts on the city’s resources to see if people who were clamoring to add fields to the passive park had a valid point.

That effort alone, according to a city attorney, took about 40 hours of staff time to complete.

In 2014, Vrska primarily focused on Costa Mesa’s troubled commemoration of its 60th anniversary. The three-day affair in June 2013 was criticized in the months afterward for low attendance, mismanagement and high cost — about $518,000.

Though questions of wrongdoing bubbled up, city officials have said all the money has been accounted for and that no public funds were used for personal gain. The city spent tens of thousands of dollars on an independent investigation, though it did not perform the forensic audit that Vrska and other City Hall critics demanded.

City officials have contended that such an audit would be prohibitively expensive, perhaps $80,000.

“But it’s not wasteful to spend $500,000 on a party and not account for where the money’s spent?” Vrska countered. “There’s a lot of hypocrisy.”

Among her 17 requests filed this year, Vrska wanted to see all of Costa Mesa’s annual financial reports available since its incorporation in 1953. Staff gathered those and her other requested documents and presented them on a special table near the clerk’s office.

Appointments have been made for her to come into City Hall every Friday to review them.

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Path toward greater efficiency

Though challenges remain, officials point to recent efforts that have brought sought-after documents to the web, including the salaries and compensation packages of all city officials; campaign finance forms; and warrant registers, documents that provide an account of all city payments made in a one-month period.

There remain more documents to put online, said officials, who are excited about the phasing-in at City Hall of new document-imaging software that digitizes records and makes them more easily searchable.

Genis said it’s a “good sign” that more records are going online.

“We know our residents are interested,” she said, “which is always kind of fun. The more information that’s out there, the better we should function. The greatest bulwark against tyranny is an informed citizenry.”

Still, even the bottomless Internet may never offer everything.

“While it’s a good idea to put more records online,” Scheer said, “there will always be a huge volume of records that aren’t.”