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

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

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[quote=Anonymous][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]

I wish my agency would take a harder line regarding fee waivers....  We tend to grant them to everyone. I strenuously objected to granting it when a private individual requested 100,000s of documents created over a 12 year period, but they did...  To make matters worse, the professional mission staff at the agency are stuck doing not only the searches, but processing the records, too.

Anyway, given that this is scoped to email sent over a relatively short period from specific addresses with a couple specific search terms, it doesn't seem like there should be a large number of responsive records.  The estimate of three hours of review by an attorney seems perfectly reasonable, but I don't see how this could possibly take 440 hours of time by a communications specialist.[/quote]

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