Digging out from under records requests – GCN.com

Digging out from under records requests

A couple years ago, officials in Evanston, Ill., were struggling to respond to the 600 open records requests they were getting each year. Bogged down by paperwork, they fought to answer requests within the five-business-day time frame required by statute.

Requests would be printed, and those hard copies would be distributed to appropriate staff members who would, in turn, make copies of the records requested. If the documents required legal review, more copies were made. There was a lot of copying and paperwork being distributed throughout the city, said Michelle Masoncup, deputy city attorney in Evanston.

In February 2016, the city implemented a software-as-a-service solution from NextRequest that centralized the process for handling open records requests as well as those filed under the Illinois Freedom of Information law. Requestors can now file queries directly through a portal, or they can submit them to records management staff who can scan and upload them to the system, which costs Evanston about $5,000 a year.

The portal numbers each request and sets time parameters, alerting officials when a due date is approaching or notifying them and requestors when an extension on the response time is issued.

All of that adds to efficiency and accountability and communication between the city and the requestor, which was the citys goal, Masoncup said.

Evanston received 25 percent more records requests in 2016 compared to 2015, but its tough to say whether thats because the portal makes it easier for citizens to pose queries or simply that an election is coming up in April, Masoncup said.

Fulfilling requests is still a burdensome process, she added. The portal is just a helpful service on the actual production of the documents and communication with the requestor.

Evanston is not alone in its open government challenges. Governments at all levels struggle with open records requests -- and that transparency comes at a cost.

Yakima, Wash., for example, spends about $500,000 a year responding to records requests, according to a January Yakima Herald article. Statewide, government offices spent more than $60 million fulfilling 114,000 requests.

At the federal level, agencies received 713,168 FOIA requests in fiscal 2015, according to the Justice Department, which accounted for almost 68,000 of them. The total estimated cost of all Freedom of Information Act-related activities governmentwide was about $480 million, a 4 percent increase over fiscal 2014.

Cost-cutting approaches: Third-party solutions

To address these expenses, some governments, like Evanstons, turn to a third-party help. After all, Justices Office of Information Policy FOIA guidelines encourage the use of technology to improve FOIA processes at federal agencies that receive at least 50 requests per year. It cites the FOIA Memorandum that former President Barack Obama issued Jan. 21, 2009, asking agencies to look for ways to use technology in responding to requests.

The main buzzword associated with modernizing the records requests is automation, a service that vendors are lining up to offer. For instance, Logikculls technology lets users drag and drop data of all sizes and types into its cloud-based system, which then analyzes, deduplicates and organizes the data, making it all searchable. After deploying Logikcull, Fairfax County, Va., went from a three-week response time to same-day responses, said Andy Wilson, CEO of the e-discovery and document management software firm.

Alfresco released a new digital business platform on Feb. 28 that combines content and process services with records management. The difference between the Alfresco Digital Business Platform and solutions targeting only FOIA problems is that agencies can build many types of applications on top of the platform, playing into the idea of buying once and using for many processes and that saves money, said Austin Adams, vice president of public sector at Alfresco.

Going out and solving FOIA to solve FOIAs sake is just repeating the same paradigm that created the challenge were in, Adams said. Alfresco offered in a microservices architecture in a cloud creates a really agile, tremendously flexible cost savings solution, he added.

But it could be difficult for smaller state and local entities to invest in external solutions. For example, Logikculls pricing ranges from a few thousand dollars to a few million, Wilson said. Alfrescos is available as a subscription based on the number of users.

Charging for services

As a result, there are other tactics agencies have tried to improve their FOIA processes. For instance, some charge for the records and the labor associated in collecting them. When gossip blog Gawker submitted a request for records and emails relating to the conduct of a police officer who drew a gun on an African American pool party-goer in McKinney, Texas, in 2015, the police department set the price for responding at almost $79,000.

That might be extreme, said Daniel Bevarly, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, and the result of an inefficient records response process.

I would ask what inefficiencies exist in that public agency that would create such a high cost for obtaining a public record, Bevarly said, adding that it is sensible for a government to charge reasonable costs in terms of what the fees are to provide an open records request.

Many agencies dont budget for FOIA processes, he said, but they should. This is becoming a service that really requires a quantitative measurement on the part of these public agencies to understand what the costs are involved in responding to these petitions, Bevarly said.

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Digging out from under records requests - GCN.com