Los Angeles City Council District 9, presently repped by Curren Price, who at this point is essentially three sealed federal indictments in a trench coat, is notoriously bad about complying with the California Public Records Act. I haven’t written about it here, but have tweeted about it regularly. See here and here, e.g., for stories about his staffie Angelina Dumarot’s¹ absolutely shameless obstruction of my access to records.

Her usual method is to print out requested emails on paper immediately on receipt of the request, wait out the 10 days before sending an unusual circumstances extension notice, and then ignore the request for between 2 months and 2 years. When her calendar reminds her to do so² she’ll either require requesters to inspect her paper copies of emails in person³ or else scan the printed pages to non-searchable PDFs,⁴ spool them up into fixed-page-length PDFs in random order with individual emails broken across different files.

The fact that she insists on turning emails into printed paper rather than producing native email files as the law requires is in itself a different and still huge problem. And then at some point in early 2020 she stopped responding to my requests entirely. Many of them are more than two years old at this point. Dumarot’s antics, without doubt entirely at the behest of her inexplicably as-yet-unindicted boss Curren Price, have obstructed access not only to emails, but to usable versions of Price’s appointment calendars and other essential information.

Which is why, if you’re curious, our friends at the Los Angeles Sunshine Coalition, represented by the absolutely essential Tasha Hill and Maya Hylton Garza, filed a writ petition the other day seeking to compel CD9’s compliance with the CPRA both with respect to file formats and to nonproduction. Get your conformed copy here and stay tuned for news!

1. AKA Angelina Valencia.
2. A calendar is almost certainly required because Dumarot’s productions are utterly uncorrelated with the facts about the records to be produced. She just makes them up, so how would she remember if she didn’t set a reminder?
3. And then offer to give them the printed pages for free once they show up, thus wasting the weeks before the appointment to inspect and wasting the requester’s time and trouble to get to City Hall for an entirely unnecessary inspection session.
4. Fed into the scanner at an angle to foil OCR.