News Analysis:

They claim their audience every Tuesday night from the speaker’s podium in City Council chambers, arguing for myriad changes throughout the city. It is one of the purest forms of democracy — the right to address government; but in doing so, Glendale’s self-described community advocates are also hitting the city’s bottom line.

Glendale’s expanding base of community advocates is having an undeniable effect on city resources in their quest for government accountability — be it a $1,300 tab to produce a 4,000-page public record, or hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a civil lawsuit — and it’s a trend that has grown over the last two years.

Whether it’s citywide compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, quicker Glendale Fire response times, more parkland, quieter playing fields, or demands for greater transparency, they have moved beyond simply airing their grievances into the microphone to researched, focused presentations to bolster their positions.

And those positions have begun to affect the city in an unprecedented way.

City Council critic Herbert Molano’s lawsuit alleging the city failed to adequately address the environmental impacts of the Downtown Specific Plan represents one of the largest, singular activist-related costs to the city in recent years.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge dismissed the lawsuit in August, but in October Molano filed an appeal to that decision after City Councilman Dave Weaver publicly admonished him for the $400,000 in legal fees the city had incurred defending itself.

Since that time, the city attorney’s office has secured an additional allocation of up to $575,000 to pay for the appeal.

But while those costs stem from the effects of a singular cause, more sustained impacts to the city’s resources have come in the form a 1968 state law — the California Public Records Act.

The law gives public agencies up to 24 days to produce existing records requested by the public. Certain information — such as home addresses, some memos, medical information and personnel files — is exempt from disclosure, but the majority is available for review.

After the state Legislature revised the law in 2002, a coalition of public and media law attorneys published an article in the Public Law Journal pointing out that the law’s purpose was to “give the public an opportunity to monitor the functioning of their government.”