Water Usage Records
Q: I want to find out which residential customers (or which addresses, if names do not get released) have the highest water bills in Los Angeles. Is this information public record? And if so, will the Department of Water and Power sort through their files to provide me with their top ten users?
A: At least one California court of appeals has found water usage records to be subject to disclosure. In New York Times v. Superior Court of Santa Barbara, 218 Cal. App. 3d 1579 (1990), a newspaper reporter sought from a water district the names and addresses of the water district’s customers who had exceeded their water allocation. The California court of appeal stated that the water district had the burden to justify that the public interest in nondisclosure of the data “clearly outweighs” the public interest in disclosure. The court reasoned:
“The records sought are public records and, in the absence of a privilege or a compelling countervailing interest, “are open to inspection at all times . . . . Significantly, the class of information sought is not contained among the subsections that list exemptions from the general disclosure requirement. (§ 6254.) Nor has the District established that the narrow privacy rights invaded are so fundamental that they outweigh the public’s “fundamental and necessary right” to be informed concerning the workings of its government.”
Thus, unless the water district can meet its burden of showing that nondisclosure of customer water usage information clearly outweighs disclosure, the public is entitled to that information under the California Public Records Act (PRA). If you have not already done so, I suggest you submit a PRA request for the records you seek. A sample PRA request is available on CFAC’s website at: http://www.cfac.org/templates/cpraletter.html.
With respect to whether the agency is obligated to search for records of the top ten users, this will depend on whether such request is reasonable. The California Supreme Court has concluded that inspection rights are not absolute and are subject to “an implied rule of reason.” Bruce v. Gregory, 65 Cal. 2d 666 (1967). The court noted that “this inherent reasonableness limitation should enable the custodian of public records to formulate regulations necessary to (among other things) . . . prevent inspection from interfering with the orderly function of his office and its employees, and generally to avoid chaos in record archives.” Therefore, if the search for the top 10 water users would interfere with the orderly function of the water district in that it would require an inordinate amount of time to search for them, for example, such request may not be deemed reasonable.