Having been on the other side, the delay may not be a deliberate strategy.

Your question likely landed in someone's inbox. The work falls outside normal scope of the person's job. There's likely zero guidance on how to answer and an implication that the person is personally liable if they accidentally reveal something that legitimately should not be revealed, like PII. And the question is competing with many other priorities in their inbox making it easier to snooze it for another day.

This is not an excuse just an explanation. I was not aware of some of this until I got here. I try hard to answer thoroughly and with as much detail as possible. Sometimes it just takes a while.

Yup, the Milwaukee PD took over 6 months for a fairly basic records request, and that was even with me following up monthly to ask them for an update. In the end, the only cost to me was <$5 for the 2GB flash drive they put the files on.

Unfortunately Wisconsin State Law only gives vague guidelines on this ("must respond reasonably quickly" or something along those lines)

My local school board fought an OPRA request in NJ for a followup on something they had responded to a few weeks before.

It cost them over $31,000 to fight over a few minor emails because the district business adminstrator was mildly embarrassed by them.

At this point, why won't you find 100 like-minded people and each of you file a FOIA request for 1/100th of the data? Instead of extending the deadline by another X each time they reply, all of the requests will have to be replied to within the same 1X, and with sufficiently small requests they won't be able to paginate.

It's worse when they just deny the request with some bullshit non-applicable exemption.

Then you have to litigate it, which can take a couple of years because you have to have in camera reviews, motions and hearings, discovery, subpoena witnesses, trial etc. Then it's likely a county court you're in, so they're going to side with the public body and you'll need to run it through the appellate court, which adds another year or two before you finally get your records.

And this is when you get on each and every single school board meeting agenda and sit in on every single public meeting available.

You ask them repeatedly why there’s a delay in public record release. You ask them all privately at every meeting for an update.

Be patient. Be polite. Be kind. But be fucking absolutely persistent; especially at the public meetings.

They want to be a fucking obstructionist? No problem; be persistent and public. School board members are not generally career politicians; they’re largely single issue members who leave once their kids are done with the district or they move on to another office or area.

School board members don’t like political pressure from the public. School district administrators are largely shielded from the public. Make them feel the pressure.

Also in Oregon (Portland), slow-walking the release of names associated with "identifiable" IDs:

> https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/anonymous-police-id-num...

About 3 years now for the NYC government

Haha, Bay Area agencies are truly amazing. When a driver (negligently, in my opinion, considering that she lied about what happened) derailed a muni train, I asked for what actions were taken as a result and the only thing that was provided was that a hearing was performed.

I don’t mind waiting but I think I’d prefer paying for faster results. BART took half a year to respond to how they calculate on-time rating but they did finally give me the answer. It had some interesting properties (canceling trains leads to higher on-time performance if trains are late) and I wrote it up here: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/BART_On-Time_Metric

governments do this on my foia requests.

Strangely, the article never posted what the request actually was.

There usually is a fee for the amount of information, or for the scope of the search, lest they get spammed for low value drive-bys.

If the request was “anything anywhere anytime related to X” they could be expensive (millions is incredulous, but expensive).

If the request was “last 9 months arrest records by X” that is more scoped.

The article never says.

Let muckrock.com know, they track this data when requests are made on their platform.

Took over a year for me and the NSA, so the benchmark is pretty slow. Ended up free, though.

Yeah, that's begging for a lawsuit compelling them to produce the requested records.

44,000 hours? For one individual? What are they doing, transcribing with quill pens, and they first have to capture and pluck a bunch of geese in order to get the quills? Even that shouldn't take anything like that long. I can't see any way that such a number is justifiable; they should certainly be force to justify it.

"Okay, I'd ALSO like the records on how you idiots came up with that ridiculous figure, and what company implemented the technology you use."

The time consuming part is probably redacting.

In a just world, someone arguing against open records laws because they’ve been personally embarrassed by them would spontaneously combust in shame.

That’s not true. They can reject requests for basically any reason and routinely do. They’ve actually patently ignored requests I’ve sent previously.

Statutes in the USA have even shorter timescales than that, but it doesn't stop the public bodies doing all sorts of end-run-arounds to avoid it.

And when they do violate your timescales, whatchagonnadoaboutit? It's technically a criminal offense in many jurisdictions, but no prosecutor in their right mind is going to bring the case. Which means you have to litigate it in civil courts and now you're four years deep and you've taken 73 days out of your work to attend court dates that end in continuances.

[The worst thing is, in Illinois it is a "civil penalty" for violating the FOIA; one State's Attorney was honest with me - "I don't care when I lose, we just write out a check to ourselves. Out one account, into the other!"]

Any corrupt organization anywhere will do its very best to protect itself from reputational loss whenever possible. It just happens that in some societies, the amount of protection those organizations can provide to themselves without quick consequences is much higher than in others.

In the US, a lot of supposed government organizations are basically immune to pressure from elected officials. A police department can do more to harm the standing of a mayor than the mayor can do to said department. In fact, sometimes you even have state involvement to make sure the mayor looks bad. See, for instance, the wonder of the St Louis Police Department. The state votes in a different way than the city, and the state passed laws to take over the local police department. Thus they control budgets and leadership, even though the actual taxpayers that foot the bill are local. As you might imagine, this leads to very strange incentives.

That surprises me. When I worked in the Uk in a regulated industry, I observed it is very risk averse and process focused. I'm surprised the government can consistently turn around a response in 30 days.

USA states have their own public records laws on top of federal FOIA laws. The national FOIA law is basically the same as UK.

In this case, they are using the Oregon Public Records Law to drag their feet. Other states have better laws, or worse depending on which side of the information the state's voters are more keen on protecting.

There's no one standard because it depends on if you're talking about federal FOIA requests or laws for one of the 50 states. And they're different.

A big difference is that so many positions that in the UK would be civil servants are elected positions in the US or are appointed and possibly confirmed by a legislative body. That means that so many positions down to the local level in the UK are political. Even if the position isn't political, the person in that job might be hoping to gain one of those positions one day.

We famously have a Kentucky clerk, Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples because it was, she argued, against her faith [1]. That should be unacceptable from any person fulfilling a government function. If something is against your faith, don't do that job. Or leave your faith at the door when you go to work. So many other places that just wouldn't happen.

But this infects a lot of state and local government functions too where sheriffs and DAs are elected positions and there have been cases where they simply won't investigate or prosecute certain cases. This was a real problem as civil rights activists were the victims of violence in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Nobody would get prosecuted.

On top of all of that, many people who one day want to run for office want to be perceived as "tough on crime" so they back the police even when doing so is indefensible.

Back to FOIA, depending on what laws are applicable, there are often laws about deadlines for a response and limitations on cost, being only reasonable labor and materials. Yet agencies will slow walk FOIA requests, sail right through deadlines and, as in this case, come up with ridiculous cost estimates to comply.

But increasingly in the US, particularly at the federal level, people responsible will just flagrantly break the law because there will be no consequences.

This has forced a lot of people to file what in the US are called (writ of) mandamus lawsuits. This is when you ask a judge to force an agency to do something they're supposed to do anyway. Really what you're doing is forcing them to explain themselves to a judge. It shouldn't be necessary but it is.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/04/1222810445/ex-kentucky-clerk-...

The US has always been a bit backwards. We're the least progressive, most conservative, most plutocratic democracy. The system was designed to stymie structural reform. We had a few periods of "social reform" but a lot more enforcement of status quo by a wealthy elite class. Ironically it's supported by the voters, who're easily manipulated by a lack of political choice (which is reinforced by the structure). In 2 years it'll end the way the Roman Republic ended.

Corruption, grift, fascism.

This is clearly hostile to the idea of civilian oversight, but the absurd scale of it is rather funny to me.

If you put $100 into US Treasury bonds (and for approximation's sake, say they have a 1% annual yield) then after 1700 years you would have 2.2 billion. And of course, if the US collapses before then, they wouldn't be able to collect on the FOIA fee anyway.

Can you provide a source to this? It sounds dumb enough it has to be true, but I want to see for myself.

Is there a transcript of the meeting anywhere?

Should be obvious why any correspondence related to something over an 8 year span is expensive. To fulfill that you have to read or at least glance at every single email.

You have to request specific keyword searches and go from there.

It's why the Attorney General is an elected office in my state. If enough people make it public enough that they aren't upholding the law, we can tank their political aspirations. Makes them less beholden to the governor too.

This sounds like a job for ... Ombudsman!

Well, it _is_ an opportunity for someone in Eugene who is willing to run for city council. Whoever is currently in that seat would either have to defend the police department (which for this issue would look pretty bad), or they would lean on the police department too, which _would_ be helpful.

Good idea! Let me open up my internet and post a comment.

i was going to say, fundraising for the eventual civil suit.

People wanted it, the protests were historically big. It’s billionaires, the politicians they buy, and the people influenced by the media they own that are opposed.

Why did you make the exact same comment four hours ago?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234721

To flip Congress in the hopes that a few people that will actually obey The U.S. Constitution are elected.

Just the police department? Seems like the politicians are complicit. That’s a problem that voting can fix.

When more people vote for the less corrupt party, both parties move further away from corruption and remain the same as each other, following Duverger's law.

What do you think left has to do with this?