Governments May Now Take ‘Months or Years’ to Fill Public Records Requests

Recently, several local government agencies heard something that got them excited. 

They heard Voice of San Diego had lost a yearslong public records lawsuit against San Diego Unified School District. And not only had Voice lost, but the state Court of Appeals wrote something that these agencies believed would favor them in public records battles going forward. 

Records of state are vital to reporting. Whether it is those obtained by public records request or those passed along in a dark alley, government documents have led to some of the most earth-shaking stories that have been published. From Voice’s SANDAG investigation to its teacher misconduct series and the infamous vaccine exemption doctor, Voice’s most powerful stories almost always rely on documents. 

At issue in the case: The California Constitution requires agencies to produce public records “promptly.” But what does that mean? The appeals court’s written ruling said that no timer could be placed on the definition of promptness; it rejected Voice’s argument that it should mean “days and weeks” as opposed to “months and years.” What is prompt, the court found, depends on the nature of the request and “the circumstances of each case.” 

The court offered an inconclusive list of factors that might apply, including the difficulty and breadth of the request, the size and resources of an agency, as well as the number of requests it receives.

Government agencies liked the sound of that. Two of them — the county of San Diego, with which Voice has had several public records battles, and a law firm that represents other governments — wrote into the Court of Appeal to ask for the opinion to be published. That would make it a legal precedent that future trial courts are required to follow.

In May, the court obliged. Its ruling is now the law of the land — though Voice has asked the Supreme Court to depublish the opinion. On the one hand, the ruling gives agencies an official menu of reasons they might use to justify the production of records taking months or years. On the other, it also gives records requesters a framework to prove that agencies aren’t following the promptness mandate. 

“I don’t love this decision, but I also don’t think the sky is falling,” said David Loy, the legal director of the First Amendment Coalition. Loy said agencies will use the opinion to attempt to stretch out the time it takes to fulfill public records requests, but he also said “the court was very clear that it is not a blank check for agencies to say, ‘Go away.'” 

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The state Legislature passed the Public Records Act in 1968 and Californians later, through a referendum, made it part of the state Constitution. It entitles the public, with several notable exceptions, to access any document created by a government. Whether email, text message, contract or spreadsheet, if a government created it, citizens have a right to ask for and get it — promptly. 

Voice, along with Editor-in-Chief Scott Lewis, sued San Diego Unified, alleging that over a period of years it had failed to produce records promptly. 

Voice cited 31 public records requests between 2015 and 2020 as evidence that the district wasn’t prompt. The requests spanned a wide array of topics. Voice reporters were looking for everything from teacher misconduct records to budget-related emails and information on the conditions of school facilities.

Of the 31 requests, eight took the district more than a year to completely fulfill. Three of those took more than 1,000 days. Only four took less than 100 days.

Voice argued that this proved the district was not following the promptness mandate.

But a lower court and later the Court of Appeals disagreed.

The court found the type of request and the district’s available resources to process that request mattered.

The court cited a specific request from April 2017, in which a Voice reporter requested a batch of the district CFO’s emails. The reporter wanted all emails to and from the CFO during 2016 that mentioned any one of 27 keywords from “good” and “bad” to “budget” and “raise” and “cash flow.”

District officials said the request kept crashing their system and negotiated with Voice over a period of months to attempt to refine the request. After more than a year, the district agreed to search the records one month at a time.

The district then produced 22 different tranches of records in the intervening years. The request was finally filled completely on July 5, 2022.

The district had one full-time employee dedicated to working on public records requests.

Under the circumstances, the court found that the district’s response was prompt. It called Voice’s request “grossly generic and broad.”

Determining what is prompt “necessarily requires consideration of the scope and burden imposed on the particular agency by the particular request,” the court wrote.

Andra Greene, San Diego Unified’s in-house lawyer, said the court’s decision validated the notion that district officials actually work hard on fulfilling requests — as opposed to creating delay.

“The decision validated our process and what we said all along, which is that reasonably prompt is not a hard and fast deadline. It’s subjective and takes into account volume and breadth of requests and the resources we have to respond to them,” she said.

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The court offered a menu of reasons agencies may cite for why it is taking them so long to fill a request.

“Appropriate factors to consider in assessing promptness include the specificity and breadth of the request, the nature and location of the records sought, the volume of data to be searched, the storage medium that must be accessed, the level of review required for any exemptions and redactions, and the complexity of the request; as well as the size, scope and complexity of the business or activities of the agency responding to the request.”

How many requests an agency receives in a year can also be considered, the court wrote. 

This was the first time one of California’s high courts had published an opinion on exactly what it means for an agency to fill public records requests promptly. No such list existed before.

A big problem with this list, according to Voice’s attorney Felix Tinkov, is that it’s “agency-centered,” as he wrote in his request to the state Supreme Court to depublish the opinion.

The court specifically said the list was not exclusive, but it also offered no reasons that explicitly favor the public — like, for instance, the public’s need to know certain information while it is still relevant.

When reporters, and regular folks, make public records request they often need the information soon if it is to be meaningful. Documents related to budget decisions that come years later are often worthless.

For Tinkov, the decision “threatens to normalize months or yearslong delay [and] invites agencies to justify delay based on ordinary administrative burdens,” as he wrote to the Supreme Court.

That might mean an agency that receives thousands of requests a year (as many do) and only has one or two employees dedicated to public records work (as many do) might justify years of delay simply by showing that a records request is difficult.

Here’s a section from the court’s decision that could be read that way: “An agency made up of a single department that receives only a handful of public record requests each year will logically be able to process productions faster than an agency comprised of a myriad of departments that receives a far larger number of requests annually.”

Tinkov argued to the Supreme Court that the decision “authorizes delay,” which is explicitly forbidden in state’s Constitution.

Loy, of the First Amendment Coalition, doesn’t think it’s quite as bad as all that — though he didn’t love it.

Loy acknowledged the menu is agency centered and said government agencies will certainly use it when arguing their cases going forward, but he’s taking a glass-half-full view.

Because the court said the menu is not exclusive that leaves the door open for requesters to make any argument they wish for what should be considered regarding promptness.

He also said the question of breadth has the potential to favor records requesters. For requests that easy to fulfill, say for a single contract, Loy said the court decision clearly requires agencies to produce records in a relatively short amount of time.

The court wrote as much: “A narrow and well-defined request that seeks easily accessible records will logically result in faster production than an overbroad and vague request that requires an agency to search through an enormous volume of data for a needle in the haystack.”

Loy focused on this passage from the decision as one of the positives: “We agree with Voice that courts should not accept ‘any and every reason’ an agency proffers as a sufficient basis to find prompt disclosure. Courts are to be guided by the CPRA’s constitutional imperative that public access to government records is a fundamental right of citizenship.”

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It’s hard to know exactly how the decision will play out going forward, but it has already come up in at least one case.

In National City, a bitter feud erupted last year related to a proposal to build a gas station on an empty lot. The owners of a nearby mortuary, who were opposed to the project, accused the developer of paying off the mayor’s assistant.

A 73-page letter then appeared as an attachment to a meeting agenda and then rather mysteriously disappeared. The letter essentially defended the mayor’s assistant.

One of the mortuary owners, Micaela Polanco, and her attorneys wanted to get their hands on all the documents related to that 73-page letter.

They made a public records request for the initial letter, including its envelope if one existed, as well as the name of the staff member who received it, as well as any communications about attaching the letter to a meeting agenda.

It only sought documents created between Aug. 29 and Sept. 2, 2025. In the world of public records requests, it was relatively narrow.

The city had three employees who work on public records requests and roughly 174 pending requests at the time.

National City representatives said they would start producing documents in tranches, on a rolling basis, but that it could take 60 says to fully fulfill the request.

Polanco’s attorney Michael Aguirre, the former city attorney of the city of San Diego, said that wasn’t going to be good enough and didn’t qualify as prompt. In October 2025, one month after the request had been made, they filed a lawsuit against National City for not delivering the records promptly.

Nearly, three months after the initial records request National City produced 80 pages of documents.

Then several months after that, in April 2026, the city closed the requests and said there were no additional documents.

The Superior Court judge in the case, Gregory Pollack, didn’t have much sympathy for Aguirre’s, and his law partner Maria Severson’s, case. He cited the Voice decision as a central part of his reasoning.

“The city has frankly more important things to do,” Pollack said from the bench. “They have got to make sure that the city is safe, schools are running. They have to prioritize. And here, I think they had only three people who could devote full time to this.”

As Severson later pointed out, National City has no authority over schools.

Pollack cited the finding in the Voice decision that promptness doesn’t mean days or weeks.

“The court said no, that’s not what it means. You have to look at everything, what the request is, how backed up the public entity is, their resources, and everything. So it really involves kind of a case-by-case analysis,” Pollack said.

In his decision, Pollack wrote: “The court finds that the city was not required to disclose the requested records in the timeframe argued by petitioner and acted promptly in providing the requested documents under applicable statutory and case law.”

Naomi Granata contributed reporting to this story.