this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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I'm not super-well read on the federal FOIA, but am responsible for public information requests at my city, which follow state regs.
At least at my level, the big one is that the government does not have to create documents to satisfy a request. If the data is not in a readable format, we essentially don't have responsive data and are not required to go through the conversion process because that would be creating data.
We also have a rule regarding conversion of electronic data from internal proprietary format to something the requestor can read that allows us to refuse if responding to the request would cause an undue disruption to city services.
My example of when we used it was a request for every copy of a specific formthat had been rejected in building applications. It would have required manually scrubbing tens of thousands of building permits to look for specific forms that were not always turned in using the same name and looking for versions that were rejected (which may have been part of accepted applications if the applicant corrected the form later).
It would have taken about 6 months for a full-time employee, and our city only has 11 staffers, so we were able to tell them "no."
Can the requestor offer to either do it themselves or pay to have someone do it?
The issue there is redaction. A form may have sensitive information that we're not legally allowed to release, so we have to redact information. I'm not talking about classified info, but things like driver's license numbers or or medical information.
It's often stuff we tell people not to give us, but when they do it still requires redaction from a PIR. It's one of the primary reasons they're such a pain in the ass - we have to manually review every page for 30 different kinds of protected info.
We can't let a third-party just sift through that data, because we don't have the right to share that information with them.
Can I bitch about that redaction for a bit? Someone hit our car while it was parked on federal property. There were cameras, and the security people figured out who did it (and called them, and they denied it). When we finally got the police report, all of the information for identifying the guilty party had been redacted, along with the officer's name and any other useful information. For a literal fender bender. Shitty driver got away with it. The police report was completely useless. I can only imagine my insurance company was like, "We waited 3 weeks for THIS?" They might as well have sent over a blank page.
I get the idea behind redacting stuff in general, but that one just pissed me off.
It's frustrating for me too, but state law requires us to redact certain things on a PIR even when we think it's stupid.
I have to redact homeowner information even though it's available through the appraisal district. That means I have to manually check for homeowner names on every page of every document, even though another agency has it labeled on the map. It adds hours and accomplishes nothing.
But it's state law, so I have to follow it.