The city of Ceres will not be posting public records requests and responses on the city website for public viewing despite Councilman James Casey’s quest to do so.

“When somebody asks for something for public record, I think it’s important that the public know what was asked for … to have the answer posted,” said Casey. 

His request was supported by Councilwoman Cerina Otero who said “I also think this is really important for our efforts of transparency and getting more information out to the public.”

Councilwoman Rosalinda Vierra expressed concern about the costs of city staff time.

City Clerk Fallon Martin was unable to say how much time would be spent uploading such information to the website but did say handling public records requests consume approximately 60 percent of one full-time employee’s overall time “so doing this is definitely going to cause additional work.”

But Casey wasn’t accepting that answer, asking “how hard is it just to copy that response? … I don’t understand how much of an additional cost it possible. I mean, the cost is all developed and developing the response.”

Martin said the city website is not set up to post responses. She noted that the city could use its NextRequest Public Records software program to post those public records requests online but requests made in-person, by email or phone “are going to be very difficult to post responses online. We don’t have a format to do that.”

Martin said it’s not just a matter of copying and pasting information but sometimes deals with video camera footage “so it will be time-consuming to figure out how to do it. And it very well could be labor-intensive if we are to post all public records requests outside of those that we receive via NextRequest.”

City Attorney Nubia Goldstein said if the council desires to have every single PRA request and a response posted “that could create some logistical problems. But again, this goes more to the scope of how many PRAs and what type of PRAs you’re looking to provide to the public.”

Martin added that public records requests related to the police department are oftentimes not public for everyone which would require a review by the city attorney’s office.

Goldstein agreed, saying there are “several records maintained by the police department that are technically classified as public records, but can only be released to certain individuals such as victims or people identified in reports.” That would likely cause a secondary layer of review to determine if they could be made public.

Councilman Daniel Martinez was opposed to Casey’s idea, saying “it does sound like it’s gonna be a pretty cumbersome project” which could affect multiple departments, potentially driving up costs that are not budgeted.

NextRequest is available on the city’s website for the public to submit a public records request.

Otero remained open to exploring the matter.

Mayor Javier Lopez agreed with Martinez, saying the city is following the law but “due to the cumbersome costs and not being it budgeted, that I cannot approve this item.”

The matter died when Lopez, Martinez and Vierra all rejected Casey’s idea.

Otero’s asks for reports

At the behest of Councilwoman Otero, the council discussed her idea to have the city manager provides monthly updates on the city website.

“Us council members do get updates from him and he routinely keeps in contact with different projects that are happening or maybe events that are going on but if we can get this out to the public on the website, I think it would be really helpful to the community and also to us council members,” said Otero.

City Manager Doug Dunford said that the city already posts events on the webpage calendar “so everybody knows what’s going on. He did suggest “we could put something together. I mean, if you want a newsletter, we could probably put one together.”

Councilman Casey said “Whatever we’re doing, obviously isn’t working very well. Tonight, we had some very important items on our agenda. We had four, maybe five citizens online and it shows that there’s 10 people online, some of which are staff, some of which is newspaper. So whatever we’re doing isn’t working very well.”

He suggested using Facebook or Instagram.

“Somewhere along the line, the public has to take some accountability of making some effort,” said Dunford. ”We can’t spoon feed them every little bit of information. The city of Ceres have been incorporated for over 100 years. We’ve had city council meetings twice a month for 100 years. I would ask generally on the council here, did you come into the council meetings on your own before you ran for election? …Yeah we can send out information, we can put it on Facebook, but the people have to actually engage and want to read it for it to be worthwhile.”

Otero suggested that the goal would be to “highlight some of the good work that our staff is doing in the city because I feel like some residents aren’t necessarily aware of what’s going on.”