The City took seventy-seven days and five rolling extensions for the assigned inspector’s own notes, while a same-class request for five other officers closed in eight days.
Anyone can ask a city for its records, and the law gives the city a short clock: ten days to decide whether it has the records, with at most one extension if things are unusual. GC §7922.535 Here, the property owner’s side asked for one city inspector’s own 2025 notes — a plain export of case numbers and note text. R.26-71 The city took seventy-seven days, sending the same “we need more time because of the volume” notice five separate times, each one pushing the deadline further out. R.26-71 A few weeks later the same owner’s side asked the same city clerk’s office for the same kind of notes for five different officers, and got five files back in eight days. R.26-1061 The city’s best explanation is that the one-inspector request covered a whole year while the five-officer request covered only two months — a real difference, and it is stated plainly here — but it does not explain a gap of more than two months built out of five rolling delay notices. R.26-71 R.26-1061 It also turns out, only because the owner’s representative pushed these records requests through the city’s portal and they can now be lined up side by side, that the same kind of note records sit in the city’s own public websites that return them in seconds — and that the inspector whose notes were the slow ones had already written months earlier, copying his supervisor, that this representative was complaining about him to the city council, a councilmember, the mayor, and the chief. R.25-3549
Bottom line: the city took seventy-seven days and five rolling delay notices to hand over one inspector’s own notes, while handing over five other officers’ notes in eight — and the slow one was the inspector who already knew the requester was complaining about him.Two CPRA requests from the same City Clerk’s office asked for raw code-enforcement note/log exports. Request 26-71 sought the assigned inspector’s 2025 notes and took seventy-seven elapsed days, from January 8 to March 26, 2026. R.26-71 Request 26-1061 sought the same kind of raw note/log export for five other officers, with the same minimum fields, and closed in eight elapsed days, from March 17 to March 25, 2026. R.26-1061
The longer request drew five rolling “volume of materials” extension notices. R.26-71 The requester challenged that rolling-extension practice on the record, citing the ten-day determination rule and fourteen-day unusual-circumstances cap. GC §7922.535 R.26-71 The City’s next action was another extension notice before production began. R.26-71
This card keeps the comparison fair. The two requests were not identical: one inspector for all of 2025 versus five officers for November and December 2025. R.26-71 R.26-1061 But the comparator still matters because it shows the City’s own processing speed for the same record class. The slow request was also the one involving the inspector who had already documented that the property representative had sent complaints up the City chain. R.25-3549
The City claimed it needed repeated extra time to search and review one inspector’s notes, yet produced five other officers’ notes from the same class of system in eight days. R.26-71 R.26-1061 The record as produced does not tie the scope difference to the seventy-seven-day processing time or the five rolling extensions.
GC §7922.535 requires a determination within ten days and caps unusual-circumstances extensions; GC §7922.500 bars using the CPRA to delay inspection or copying.
R.26-71 opened January 8, 2026 and closed March 26, 2026, with five extension notices dated January 20, February 17, March 3 (twice), and March 18. R.26-71
On March 17, the requester objected in writing to the sequence of notices and cited GC §7922.535(a) and (b). R.26-71
R.26-1061 opened March 17, 2026 and closed March 25, 2026 with five redacted XLSX officer files (Officers Corral, Western, Moore, Xiong, Kheng) and no equivalent volume-based delay. R.26-1061
The City’s own Accela and CitizenServe portals show that per-case activity and documents are directly addressable by case number. For redaction-heavy note exports, the eight-day comparator remains the City’s own benchmark for this record class. R.26-1061
Months before either request, Lovato wrote that the representative had sent complaints to City Council, Councilmember Guerra, the mayor, the chief, and others, and copied his supervisor. R.25-3549 That documentation predates R.26-71 by roughly six months; the inspector whose notes were delayed was aware of the complaints. R.26-71
The strongest City answer is that the requests differed in scope: one inspector for a full year versus five officers for two months. R.26-71 R.26-1061 That distinction is real and this card does not hide it. The problem is that the produced record does not connect that distinction to five rolling extension notices and a seventy-seven-day closure, especially when the same office processed five other officers’ same-class note exports in eight days. R.26-71 R.26-1061 The card therefore asks for the missing neutral explanation: a search log, determination record, exemption-review record, or other contemporaneous basis for the delay. Without that, the produced record shows a seventy-seven-day delay for the inspector already aware of complaints up the chain, R.25-3549 compared with an eight-day same-class comparator. R.26-1061 GC §7922.535 GC §7922.500