Four Records Requests, No Records

Since August, I have asked Pinedale County Water District for public records four times under the California Public Records Act. I have not received a single page. Every request and every reply is posted, unedited except for personal contact details, on the Records requests page at pcwdinfo.com. Here is what happened, and what I think it means.

What I asked for

The records are ordinary district business: court filings in the City of Fresno sewer cases, what the district has paid in legal costs, correspondence with the City, how the 2023 sewer surcharge and the WAS water surcharge were calculated, monthly bill lists and budget reports, past rate studies, audits, and PG&E bills for the district’s wells. Court filings are already public. Bill lists are handed out at open meetings. None of this is closed-session material.

What came back

On Aug. 13, district counsel Neal Costanzo replied that “a board member cannot successfully make a request for public records from the entity he is an officer for because a board member cannot sue the district to enforce the request,” and that the district would not respond further.

On Aug. 24 he wrote: “We’re done I am not responding to this again. Your remedies to sue. Go for it and see what happens.” On Sept. 17: “There isn’t going to be a further response.”

On Oct. 23 I sent a narrowed request, including three categories I had never asked for before. The general manager forwarded it to the board. Within two hours Mr. Costanzo replied to the group: “We don’t respond to the same public records act request more than once. This is a conglomerate of multiple requests he has made previously that I have responded to before. No further response is necessary.”

Director Christine Silva then asked him where the required exemptions and the name of the person responsible for the decision were. His answer: “As I read the responses that I’ve sent the exemptions are all encompassing and the statutes are cited. It is obvious who made the decision.”

What the law says

Three sections of the Government Code matter here:

• Section 7921.305: an elected member or officer of a local agency is entitled to the agency’s public records “on the same basis as any other person.”
• Section 7922.535: within 10 days, the agency must tell the requester whether it has the records and will provide them.
• Section 7922.540: a denial must be in writing and must name the person responsible for it.

My view

I’m not a lawyer, and this is my reading of the statute, not a legal opinion. As I read it, “we already answered” is not one of the exemptions the Act allows. The replies I received do not identify any exemption for any specific record, and “it is obvious who made the decision” does not name anyone. Three of the items in my October request had never been requested before, so they cannot have been answered before.

These are records any resident can ask for. If the district’s position is that a director has fewer rights to them than a member of the public, I think residents deserve to hear that position explained in an open meeting, with the statute it rests on.

I’ve asked the general manager for an item-by-item answer. When one arrives, it will be posted on pcwdinfo.com alongside everything else.

Dutcher’s Take

In my view, this is stonewalling. The long-standing board majority has been able to set both the narrative and the direction of the district for years, and these refusals continue that pattern.

The legal fight with the City of Fresno was presented to customers as finished. That is how it was portrayed to me and to others I’ve spoken with. It isn’t. The district is pursuing three active appeals in the same case. The dispute started because the City asked to audit the district’s sewer records, something the 2007 sewer agreement allowed and the courts upheld. Even so, the board has kept fighting, and customers are paying for it.

The board had a chance to end this for a fraction of what it has cost. According to testimony described in the Court of Appeal’s 2022 opinion, the City’s original proposal in 2016 was for the district to pay the judgment, then about $127,500, over 10 years with no interest. General Manager Jason Franklin testified that the district countered by offering 25 percent of the judgment, and that it would seriously consider $40,000. The City’s representative understood that to be what the district’s board wanted. No written offer was ever made, the talks broke down, and the City went back to court in 2017. By 2024 the judgment had grown to $312,304.25, plus interest, before counting the district’s own legal costs.

Because few people pay attention to a district this small, decisions like these have gone largely unchallenged. I think that needs to change, and that starts with putting the records where anyone can read them.