Page 35 - GCN, March and April 2017

Acouple years ago, officials in Evanston, Ill., were struggling to respond to the 600 open-records re- quests they were getting each year. Bogged down by paperwork, they fought to answer requests within the five-business-day time frame re- quired by statute.
Officials would print requests and distribute those hard copies to ap- propriate 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 imple- mented a software-as-a-service so- lution from NextRequest that cen- tralized the process for handling open-records requests as well as those filed under the Illinois Free- dom of Information Act. Requestors can now file queries directly through a portal, or they can submit them to records management employees 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 so it can alert officials when a due date is approaching or notify them and re- questors 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 city’s goal, Masoncup said.
Evanston received 25 percent more records requests in 2016 compared
to 2015, but it’s tough to say wheth- er that’s because the portal makes it easier for citizens to post queries or because an election is coming up in April, Masoncup said.
Fulfilling requests is “still a bur- densome process,” she added. The portal “is just a helpful service on the actual production of the docu- ments and communication with the requestor.”
Evanston is not alone in its open- government challenges. Agencies at all levels struggle to fulfill open- records requests, and that transpar- ency comes at a cost.
Yakima, Wash., for example, spends about $500,000 a year re- sponding to records requests, ac- cording to a recent article in the Ya- kima Herald. Statewide, government offices spent more than $60 million fulfilling 114,000 requests.
At the federal level, agencies re- ceived 713,168 requests under the Freedom of Information Act in fis- cal 2015, according to the Justice Department, which accounted for almost 68,000 of them. The total es- timated cost of all FOIA-related ac- tivities governmentwide was about $480 million, a 4 percent increase over fiscal 2014.
THIRD-PARTY SOLUTIONS
To address those expenses, some governments are turning to third- party help. After all, the FOIA guide- lines issued by Justice’s Office of In- formation Policy encourage the use of technology to improve processes at federal agencies that receive at least 50 requests per year. It cites the FOIA memo that then-President Barack Obama issued in January 2009 direct- ing agencies to look for ways to use
RECORDS REQUESTS, BY THE NUMBERS
600
Number of open-records requests Evanston, Ill., was receiving each year
25%
Increase in Evanston records requests from 2015 to 2016
$500,000
Amount spent by Yakima, Wash., each year in responding to records requests
$60,000,000
Amount spent by the state of Washington to fulfill 114,000 requests
713,168
Number of requests received by federal agencies in 2015
$480,000,000
Total estimated cost of all FOIA-related activities governmentwide
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