{ "id": "1992-january-access-denied", "slug": "1992-january-access-denied", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1992-january-access-denied.html", "year": 1992, "month": "January", "monthNum": 1, "headline": "Access denied?", "kicker": "", "author_name": "Robert Jackson", "author_title": "Editor", "affiliation": "Orange County Register", "summary": "Orange County Register reporters James Grimaldi and Ron Campbell spent four months negotiating with a California government agency to obtain a database on magnetic tape, facing bureaucratic runaround and inflated fees before ultimately invoking the California Public Records Act to challenge the agency's legal authority to charge excessive duplication costs.", "keywords": [ "patience", "database", "bureaucracy" ], "topics": [ "Investigative Methods", "Government & Politics", "Data & Databases" ], "technologies": [ "9-track tape" ], "full_text": "If you were to ask Orange County (Ca.) Register reporter James Grimaldi for advice on how to negotiate with government agencies for databases on nine-track magnetic tape, he'd tell you one word - patience.\n\nGrimaldi, and reporter Ron Campbell, had to display plenty of patience in obtaining a database from a state government agency that gave them a four-month-long runaround.\n\nBecause the Register is currently using the database in preparation for a series of computer-assisted projects, Grimaldi and Campbell requested that the database and its origin remain anonymous. That, however, doesn't make their story less interesting. According to Grimaldi the Register discovered the database in late July, and he formally requested it from the agency on Aug. 1.\n\nTheir troubles began immediately.\n\n\"This is a very large agency and I was bounced back and forth from office to office and was finally told we couldn't have the database,\" Grimaldi said. \"Eventually I contacted the computer (technicians) and found that the agency had sold the information to another agency for $2,870.\"\n\n\"We felt that (the information) was grossly overpriced,\" he added.\n\nGrimaldi and Campbell requested the database, but didn't hear from the agency for a month. When they were finally contacted, they were told that their request would be granted - for a mere $1,712.99.\n\n\"The more I thought about it, the more it sounded as if (the agency) just picked a price right out of the air,\" Grimaldi said.\n\nEven more astounding was the reply they received when he asked about the basis for the high charge. \"They informed us that the records were in the custody of the Stephen P. Teale Data Center and that the proposed charges were based on Teale's published billing rates,\" Grimaldi explained.\n\nThe Teale Data Center is a public computer information agency that stores various California public agency databases by contract, according to Grimaldi. Although Teale is a public agency they can include overhead costs such as building maintenance, in pricing the duplication of databases.\n\nSo Grimaldi and Campbell's next step was to contact Teale Director Chong W. Ha, and request the database. What they found was infuriating. According to Ha, the public agency - Teale - had custody of the database, and that their \"representations were inaccurate.\"\n\n\"Our patience came to an end when we learned that (the agency) had misinformed us about the location of (the database) and the basis for the prohibitive fee it proposed to charge,\" Grimaldi explained. \"Since (Aug. 1) we talked to more than two dozen people and exhausted, several times over, the statutory 10-day limit for finding and duplicating the records.\"\n\nMore importantly, Grimaldi said, was that there was no legal basis for the agency to charge the public what Teale would charge. In a letter to the agency requesting the database, Grimaldi and Campbell based their claim on the California Public Records Act.\n\n\"Teale, as a self-supporting agency, claims considerable latitude in setting fees; it recovers every cost of its operation, no matter how tangential, from fees charged to other state agencies. Under the California Public Records Act, (the agency) does not enjoy such latitude,\" Grimaldi wrote. \"The law is explicit: You may charge only the 'direct cost of duplication.'\"\n\n\"In our letter we attempted to convey that we were operating in the public interest and that access to the information concerning the conduct of the people's business is fundamentally important,\" Grimaldi added.\n\nThe head of the agency agreed, and on Nov. 12, Grimaldi and Campbell received more than they could have hoped for - an $81.18 charge for the database, and an apology.\n\n\"I want to thank you for bringing the matter of my department's overcharges for the sale of (the database) file records to my attention,\" wrote (the head of the agency). \"At the same time, please accept my apology for the improper fees quoted to you.\"\n\nGrimaldi said that because of the questions raised by the Register, (the agency) is reevaluating the methods used for calculating associated costs. They are also revising the fee structure so that it \"accurately reflects actual direct costs incurred to produce either hard copy or computer tape reproduction of the files.\"\n\n\"We realized that we were the first news organization to ever request (the database),\" Grimaldi said. \"It was a situation that the agency had set precedent in pricing the cost of duplicating the database.\"", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1993-march-orange-county-register-settles-the-score-on-soft-money-contributions", "score": 0.175 }, { "slug": "1991-may-transporting-toxics-through-california", "score": 0.139 }, { "slug": "1996-november-california-dreaming", "score": 0.139 }, { "slug": "1991-may-cpu-time-part-two", "score": 0.13 }, { "slug": "1992-december-two-weapons-fight-unfair-database-pricing-old-fashioned-haggling-and-knowing-the-law", "score": 0.13 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1992-january-access-denied.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1992-january-access-denied.json" }