LA's Public Records Contain Thousands of Duplicate Images, Creating Major Problems

Los Angeles city archivists flagged the problem formally in early 2025, but it had been building for years: municipal digital repositories across multiple departments contained tens of thousands of duplicate image files, some triplicated or worse, gumming up searches, inflating storage costs and slowing permit approvals at a moment when the city can least afford delays.

The issue matters now because LA is operating under simultaneous pressure from Mayor Karen Bass's housing emergency declaration — which demands faster permit processing — and a 2028 Olympic construction timeline that leaves almost no room for bureaucratic drag. When a building inspector in Van Nuys pulls up a property file and gets four identical scans of the same 1987 plat map, that is not a minor inconvenience. It is a compounding liability.

How the Archives Got This Way

The roots run back to the late 1990s, when the city's Information Technology Agency began its first large-scale document digitisation push. Individual departments — the Department of Building and Safety, the Bureau of Engineering, the Office of the City Clerk — each ran separate scanning contracts with separate vendors, using different file-naming conventions and no shared deduplication protocol. When the city migrated to a unified content management platform in 2012, records from those earlier siloed systems were bulk-imported without cleaning.

Then came the emergencies. After the 2018 Woolsey Fire, city agencies scrambled to digitise paper records for affected parcels in the Santa Monica Mountains and the hillside communities above Malibu. The 2020 pandemic pushed another wave of rushed scanning as staff worked remotely and needed remote access to physical files. Each crisis added another layer of redundant files. The January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires triggered yet another emergency digitisation effort covering thousands of parcels in Pacific Palisades, Altadena and neighborhoods along the 210 Freeway corridor — and again, speed took priority over hygiene.

The City Clerk's office, which maintains the central document repository at City Hall East on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles, estimates the problem now spans multiple petabytes of stored data, though the office has not published a precise public figure on the total cost of redundant storage. A 2023 audit by the city's Bureau of Contract Administration — covering a smaller subset of engineering files — identified duplicate rates of roughly 18 percent across scanned infrastructure drawings, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Los Angeles. At commercial cloud storage rates, even a fraction of a petabyte of unnecessary data represents tens of thousands of dollars in annual costs.

What Fixing It Actually Requires

The Los Angeles Department of City Planning began a pilot deduplication project in the spring of 2026, starting with permit image files tied to properties in Council Districts 4 and 11 — areas that include Hancock Park, Los Feliz, Brentwood and Mar Vista, chosen partly because of their high permit volumes and partly because both districts contain parcels affected by the 2025 fire emergency. The pilot uses hash-based fingerprinting software to flag exact and near-exact duplicate images before a human reviewer makes a final deletion call.

The Bureau of Engineering is running a parallel effort focused on infrastructure drawings for projects connected to Olympic venue corridors, including the rebuilt Crenshaw/LAX Transit Project alignment and road improvement plans near SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Getting those records clean before the 2027 construction acceleration phase is the stated goal.

Neither effort has a published completion date. Both depend on inter-departmental data-sharing agreements that, as of July 2026, are still being negotiated through the city's Information Technology Agency. City employees who work with these systems describe a process that is moving, but slowly — in part because duplicate removal is irreversible, and no department wants to be the one that accidentally deleted something it later needs.

For residents, the practical upshot is straightforward: if you have a permit application, an appeal or a records request pending with any city department, ask your contact whether your file was part of a recently digitised batch. If it was, request confirmation that all associated images have been verified before any decision is made. The cleanup is underway. It is not finished.