Reply to MCPS Charging Parental Rights Group $18K to Fulfill Public Information Request

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "MCPS Charging Parental Rights Group $18K to Fulfill Public Information Request "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The request was probably too broad.  If it takes 440 hours they were probably requesting every document in the system to be viewed or scanned in some way.[/quote]

You can see the substance of the request at the link. They’re asking for emails containing “opt-out” and "opt out" sent from 30 addresses over a 6 month period.

That's an easy search to run on the back-end. Manual processing time would obviously depend on the number of emails, but I'd be surprised if there are more than a thousand or so. Probably much less after deduplication.

I've done FOIAs ordered if magnitude bigger than that. And we didn't charge, despite the FOIA being obviously malicious.

I fully support charging, but $18k is ridiculous.
[/quote]

Whether or not the FOIA request is "malicious" is irrelevant.  I work for a federal agency and review FOIA responses.  We don't hand out free FOIA responses if we feel like it.  There are specified criteria for a fee waiver.  If a request does not meet the criteria, then the requester must pay search and review fees if they exceed a nominal amount (every agency is different, but generally anything up to $25-50 is provided free of charge).  Search and review fees are based on the grade level of the staff performing the work; and hourly rates for attorney staff or managerial staff are obviously much higher than for clerical or administrative staff.  For a FOIA of this magnitude you would have staff at all levels doing the work.  I'm an attorney so I don't get involved in searches, but I've had reviews that have taken a week and I am required to report all of those hours to the FOIA office for billing purposes.  When you consider the number of staff hours devoted to this, $18,000 does not seem unreasonable (also, as many others have pointed out, this is only the initial estimate and surely the parties will work together to narrow the search).
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics