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CALIFORNIA PUBLIC RECORDS ACT
March 14, 2011
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California Public Records Act
We have collected the surviving legislative history materials for the 1968 “California Public Records Act.” Numerous sections relating to public records in various California Codes were affected in 1968 following legislative passage of Assembly Bill 1381. Assembly members William T. Bagley and Harvey Johnson introduced the bill on April 3, 1968 on behalf of the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
The Assembly and Senate Committees on Judiciary considered the policy issues raised by the measure. The Assembly Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Committee on Finance examined the bill’s fiscal implications. Assembly Bill 1381 was amended five times, twice in the Assembly and three times in the Senate, before being approved by both Houses of the Legislature. Governor Ronald Reagan signed the legislation on August 29, 1968, and it was thereafter recorded as Chapter 1473 of the Statutes of 1968.
A summary of Assembly Bill 1381 was noted in the Enrolled Bill Report to Governor prepared by the Legislative Secretary as follows:
Assembly Bill No. 1381 enacts the California Public Records Act. The bill defines public records and requires public records to be open to inspection during office hours.
Assembly member Bagley provided background discussion regarding Assembly Bill 1381 in his letter to Governor Reagan, stating, in part:
The bill is an outcome of a six-month study by an advisory committee to the Assembly Judiciary Committee which was appointed pursuant to a resolution of the 1967 legislative session. The advisory committee was made up of representatives of county supervisors, League of California Cities, Attorney General, newspaper publishers, broadcasters, bar association, the Legislature, and other interested segments of the public. . . .
I will not attempt to delineate the bill in its specific application. You should, however, have the background that there is virtually no firm law on this subject at present. There are some very general code sections dating back to 1872 which simply acknowledge the existence of public writings and public records but do not define them. Over the last almost hundred years the Attorney General has been called upon time and time again as to what are and what are not records available to the public. We thus find the Attorney General’s office “a legislating office” because of the failure of the Legislature to enact a comprehensive statute. What we have done this year is to enact such a statute.
There are documents in our collection which indicate that the California Public Records Act was intended to address both the public’s right to know the contents of public records, and the public’s interest in forbidding the release of information when such release would not be in the best interests of the public. According to the author of the measure in his letter to Governor Reagan,
. . . the basic philosophy of the bill is that the burden is upon the governmental agency to show that a given record should not be made public. This then allows a citizen to see a public record or demand that the governmental entity involved show that it should not be public. . . .
Following the legislative studies held by the Assembly Committee on Governmental Organization, and as indicated above in Assembly member Bagley’s letter to Governor Reagan, the Advisory Committee on Open Meeting and Public Records, Assembly Bill 1381 was introduced. It appears that some of the supporters of the legislation saw Assembly Bill 1381 as a substantial improvement over predecessor bills introduced by Assembly member Bagley, who sought to increase the availability of public records during the 1965 and 1967 legislative sessions: Assembly Bill 3015 of 1965 and Assembly Bill 2432 of 1967. Both of these earlier bills were referred to their first policy committee in the Assembly where no further legislative action was taken upon the measures.