Los Angeles Daily News: Two California public record laws: one for the Legislature and one for everyone else

Documents released in February, showing current and former California legislators had been accused of sexual misbehavior and other harassment, weren’t released under the California Public Records Act.

Instead, the Legislature has its own, more restrictive public records law: the Legislative Open Records Act.

But not everyone in the Legislature opposes more openness. In 2011, Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-Pasadena, introduced Assembly Bill 1129. The bill would have repealed the Legislative Reform Act, and it passed the Assembly on a 70-0 vote. But it never came up for a vote in the state Senate.

“I was trying to bring more transparency to the budgeting system,” Portantino said. “The Legislature at the time had claimed that because budgets were communicated to legislators, they were communications, they weren’t budgets, and that LORA exempted out communication. You could not get public disclosure over budgets, because they were not budgets, they were communications.”

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