If not the owner, you'd think whoever the contact is for notice of service would be listed. This sounds like some kind of west coast convulated "right to privacy" exercise.
I haven't seen "registered agent" on the FBN statement documents for all the other Cali counties I looked at. That's another difference between these filings and the actual secretary of state business registrations.
But it's definitely NOT a right to privacy issue because there are dozens of examples where other counties in the state either post an image of the filed document or at least provide the registrant/owner name in their online search results.
Also, California's open records law is a pretty comprehensive (compared to other states) when it comes to state/county/local government agencies. The place it falls short is with law enforcement agencies, where they grant huge leeway for each agency to set their own standards, policies and customized practices that follows a "do whatever the hell you please, however you see fit" line of reasoning.
So the issues I'm facing is the agency in question here (LA County Registar-Recorder/County Clerk) is a compound problem:
- The agency has a set policy on what is not eligible for an open records request. That puts FBN statements into an open records exemption loophole where higher costs apply for search/copy charges
- The agency is multiple offices/departments merged into one big clusterfuck, with one budget and unilateral practices + fee schedules that offsets their higher than usual costs
- The agency opted to blow money on building their own custom online service systems rather than buy into one of the regional packages like CRIS or PARIS, so they probably can't afford the overhead costs of making full dox available or adding the missing registrant field to their search tool
