PRA Requests and Responses (Office of the Governor - California)

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the California Public Records Act (CPRA, and all sunshine ordinances applicable in your jurisdiction, if any), I hereby request from Office of the Governor - California ("Agency") the following records:
1. All CPRA requests (including all follow-ups, and no matter how received) prepared, owned, used or retained by your Agency, received between January 1, 2018 and the date of receipt of this request (inclusive).
2. All CPRA responses (including a copy of all responsive records and all follow-ups, and no matter how they were sent) prepared, owned, used or retained by your Agency, transmitted between January 1, 2018 and the date of receipt of this request.
3. Any logs, tracking spreadsheets, or similar of CPRA requests and responses showing items between January 1, 2018 and the date of receipt of this request
4. Any records showing official email addresses, phone numbers, employee names, job titles, and website URLs or other mechanisms used for receiving CPRA requests

Please consider these important notes, incorporated into our request:

A. ** We are specifically asking for ALL public records act requests and responses prepared, owned, used or retained by your Agency, whether they are for your own Agency, or other agencies that you may represent or work with.
If your Agency is an Office of Counsel, Clerk, Manager or other representative of a County, City, or other parent public agency, then we believe you handle CPRA requests for both your own Agency AND the parent agency and its other departments, councils, offices, boards, and other units, and we want all the CPRA requests/responses that go through your Agency. Furthermore, any requests or responses under any local sunshine ordinance applicable to your jurisdiction are included in "CPRA requests" and "CPRA responses." **

B. ** Every response you send or provide (including all responsive records) may be automatically and immediately visible on the MuckRock.com web service used to issue this request. **

C. Consider your exemption-waiver requirements under the CPRA (regarding records you have already disclosed previously) when responding to us (Govt Code 6254.5).

D. Consider your obligations under City of San Jose v. Superior Court (Smith), S218066 to search personal accounts/devices storing public records.

E. I would prefer the request fulfilled electronically, by e-mail attachment, using the original electronic format of all responsive records as required by the CPRA (Govt Code 6253.9), if at all possible; or uploaded directly to MuckRock.com using the instructions at the bottom of this email otherwise.

F. Note that if e-mail or text messages are included in the responsive records, we want a full copy () of the original e-mail or text messages including ALL headers and metadata (except those required to be redacted by law). If you convert e-mails to PDF or similar printed format, be certain to include ALL headers and metadata (not just the common from/to/subject/etc. headers).

G. Please send only those records available without any fees - since we have asked for electronic copies, we expect all will be available without fees. Nevertheless, for any records for which you would charge fees, instead of copies, please provide us the (free) statutorily-mandated CPRA determination of what records exist, so we may inspect them in person if we so choose to do so, and notify us of the expected costs if we wished to move forward with copies.

H. Please provide responsive records on a rolling basis as you approve/redact them for disclosure.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.

I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 10 calendar days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Anonymous Person #2859385

Thank you. We believe you are improperly withholding, at least, records or portions thereof, responsive to our request #2 "All CPRA responses (including a copy of all responsive records and all follow-ups, and no matter how they were sent) prepared, owned, used or retained by your Agency, transmitted between January 1, 2018 and the date of receipt of this request."

Responsive records that you have already released to members of the public must be disclosed to us as well, pursuant to Govt Code 6254.5 which states in relevant part "Notwithstanding any other law, if a state or local agency discloses a public record that is otherwise exempt from this chapter, to a member of the public, this disclosure shall constitute a waiver of the exemptions specified in Section 6254 or 6254.7, or other similar provisions of law. " The exceptions to waiver-exemption listed under 6254.5 do not include the 6254(l) exemptions you appear to be relying on.

You are further required under Govt Code 6253 (a) to provide "Any reasonably segregable portion of a record ... after deletion of the portions that are exempted by law." For example, each of your CPRA responses to other members of the public will presumably include (A) a letter/followup response AND (B) the responsive records themselves. While you claim (but we do not concede) exemption of (A) under 6254(l), you should be able to segregate (B) and disclose those to us immediately (since the redaction/withholding process for those records must have already occurred, and you must disclose to us what you already disclosed to others). The letters of response and the records should be easily separable as they are probably separate electronic documents.

Taken together, you should provide us with all responsive records you provided to other members of the public between January 1, 2018 and April 21, 2019. Please let us know if you will comply.

** Every response you send or provide (including all responsive records) may be automatically and immediately visible on the MuckRock.com web service used to issue this request. **

Thank you,
Anonymous