GLENDALE UP AGAINST LOCAL GADFLY CITY TO LIMIT TIME SPENT ON HIS RECORD REQUESTS.

Byline: EUGENE TONG Staff Writer

GLENDALE -- Barry Allen demands a lot from city government -- so much so that City Hall has put him on notice.

A local gadfly and publisher of a political newsletter, Allen, 66, is carrying out a one-man crusade against what he thinks is government waste.

His weapon is the California Public Records Act, which he has used to obtain city business contracts, budgets and staff-time logs in search of the smoking gun.

``Without someone looking over their shoulders, they're going to do whatever they want,'' said Allen, a former private investigator who publishes the weekly handout Vanguard.

Yet city officials said the sheer volume of Allen's requests -- more than 270 during the past 12 months -- has occupied so much staff time they can't do their regular duties.

Allen's requests have cost taxpayers more than $35,000 in the 500 hours clerks and lawyers have spent during the past year fulfilling them, City Attorney Scott Howard said.

In a letter to Allen sent last month, Howard said the city will limit the time spent fulfilling his requests and reply to them in order, even if it misses the 24-day deadline, though it will make exceptions if Allen's request is urgent.

``He's just a constant barrage,'' Howard said. ``It gets to a point you've got to wonder, the money spent on city staff -- are we really just serving him or serving the community?''

Allen responded: ``The city attorney has missed the essence of the law. The law is very specific, and their people have not been honoring the request in a timely basis.''

Enacted in 1968, the California Public Records Act requires all state and local government agencies, with a few exceptions, to respond to document requests within 10 days.

A 14-day extension can be invoked if more time is needed to locate or prepare records, such as blacking out personal information including addresses and Social Security numbers.

``Except in the most extreme circumstances, the Legislature made a choice here,'' said David Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition. ``The choice was, if you're a government agency and you get a request, you fulfill a request.''

Area cities routinely handle such records requests. Juli Scott, an assistant city attorney in Burbank, said she receives no more than 10 requests a month, some of which could take up to three weeks to complete.

Scott, who is familiar with the issue facing her counterparts in Glendale, called the volume of requests they're facing ``absolutely extreme.''

``The problem is the people who have to try to pull all those records, they have other things to do,'' she said. ``When it gets to the point where it interferes with what you're doing, that's ridiculous.''

Allen, who began filing records requests about three years ago, had about three dozen outstanding as of Friday, including calls for city balance sheets, hiring policies and studies. Five were filed on a single day in December.

A Dec.18 request asked for data used to ``calculate time spent'' responding to public records requests from ``Vanguard, Barry Allen and others.''

So far, his efforts have turned up what he thinks is excessive overtime paid to the Glendale Fire Department. He said it's all about accountability.

``That means when the city is spending for a public purpose, it goes to the public purpose,'' he said.

Yet Howard said Allen's requests can be complicated and time-consuming to fulfill under the state-mandated deadlines, and they just keep coming.

``We'd never draw the line until we're overwhelmed,'' he said. ``It has to be extreme. That's why we haven't sent that letter to anyone else.''

Scheer said state courts have always upheld the public records act, and no challenger has successfully argued they were facing such a burden it required circumventing the law.

He recalled a case in which an agency asked for exemptions because a request would take months to fulfill; the court rejected it.

``The law doesn't recognize this limitation I'm talking about,'' Scheer said. ``That's how the law ought to be. ... I hate to see any language added to laws that try to set a standard to control excessive use because wherever you draw the line, you'll be drawing in the wrong place.''

Howard said he's willing to test his argument before a judge.

``If somebody wants to test it in court, we wouldn't have sent the letter if we weren't prepared to do that,'' he said. ``We're trying to do it in a reasonable way.''

eugene.tong(at)dailynews.com

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Photo:

Barry Allen stands in front of Glendale City Hall, where he is known as a bit of a gadfly.

John McCoy/Staff Photographer