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.
In one example, someone wanted all internal training, presentations, engineering documentation, internal policies, etc related to the use of AI to accomplish a specific goal.
I was temporarily assigned to be a kind of product manager for the project, so I have the best access to all the multiple departments with 100s of staff involved. That said, I have no authority over them. I don't know every related policy, who developed what training, what engineering documents exist in some random share drive.
It meant calling meetings with the project leads to explain the request. Then hassling them to hassle their staff to check all their drives. Reading through all that material to ensure engineering didn't screen cap PII while making a training slide or put security-sensitive details in an engineering document. There was no guidance on what is not releasable.
And we get maybe one or two of these requests a year for different projects. So it wouldn't be a judicious use of taxpayer resources to build a reliable system for answering these requests.
Eh, I'd say it's way more complex than that. State agencies are under budget and staffing constraints just like regular businesses. Every employee tends to have more work than they can finish, and tax payers don't want to increase funding or want to actively lower it.
I’m with you and always the first to point out an alternative explanation
But having to do with this subject specifically, the pattern is so common and the behavior so blatant, the amount of looking out for each other is so absurd, that I’d reject any claim that gives them the benefit of the doubt that doesn’t come with convincing evidence
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)
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
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.
> the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04.
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.
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.
The UK FOIA law only requires the government to acknowledge the request within 30 days. Not to actually fulfill it. In reality it is much, much slower and incomplete than the OP suggested.
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.
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.
This is comparatively a bargain compared to what the DoD wanted to charge:
> In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.
Is there no organisation with power to police this? In the UK we have the ICO and if we're not satisfied with the response to a FOIA request we can escalate it to them.
This story gets even more interesting when you pull out other sources:
> During a Thursday, Oct. 8, meeting of the Eugene Police Commission, Chief Chris Skinner said: “We reached out to the requester, gave them a heads-up that it was going to be a big number, and asked them if they’d like to collaborate with us on how they can narrow their scope, change their scope, get them to yes on something to release that, and they chose not to do that.”
But James Croxton, editor-in-chief for Double Sided Media, in an email Friday to Lookout Eugene-Springfield said police never made such an offer, describing how managing editor Mary Bell called to follow up on the initial request and was told by a records supervisor that the number of potentially responsive documents was 2.6 million.
“The call lasted for 5 minutes and 11 seconds and there was no offer to help narrow the scope or anything of the sort,” Croxton said Friday.
> Double Sided Media sought “[all] completed internal affairs complaints, intake logs, investigative summaries, witness interviews, audio/video evidence logs, and disciplinary notices issued to or involving Justin Peckels where findings of misconduct were ‘sustained,’” with the request covering an eight-year time period, June 18, 2018, through July 30, 2026.
The request also sought “[a]ll internal and external communications, correspondence, and logs sent, received, or maintained by EPD’s executive staff — specifically including Police Chief Chris Skinner and Deputy Chief — dated between June 18, 2018, and July 30, 2026, regarding any misconduct investigations, internal status, negotiations, discipline, stipulation, or certification of Justin Peckels.”
—
Contrast that with this statement from the posted article:
> The city’s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04. (A separate request by the outlet for similar records concerning a former police officer, Eric Klinko, was met with a comparatively modest estimate of $195,869.52, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)
—
Charitably, Justin Peckels’ supervisory bandwidth appears to be roughly 12x that of another officer.
I'm looking at this from across the pond, and I'm not convinced that's true. From here it looks like you have a choice between voting for the liar who says things you don't like, or the liar who says things you like. Neither will do what they say.
UK and EU politicians are also liars, but some are only so out of necessity. I see corruption here too, but I also see people trying to go the middle road and do what they believe is right. I do not see that in the USA.
At some point, we need to face the functional corruption of many of our basic institutions. Defund/Abolish the Police tried to force that reckoning, but no one wanted to hear it. This, in the same country that dismantled many of its own public school systems when racial integration was ordered, proving that such sweeping changes are possible when there is the will and funding behind it.
An outside observer could credibly conclude that Americans actually favor corruption in many instances. Certain instances.
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.
I sent a public records request to my local school district on March 9th 2026.
They responded on 19th March 2026 saying they'd respond on in late April.
Since then, every month they've sent an email with some small portion of the records, with a PDF letter saying they'll send a follow up a month later.
I've received 8 of those responses so far, and there's no indication when, if ever, I will have received all the records responsive to my request.
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.
Maybe in some cases, but not in this case with this agency (SFUSD).
The responses I've received so far from SFUSD (over several years) were each from someone whose whole job is/was dealing with public records requests.
One of the requests that was refused was for a Google Slides deck that was visible to all of SFUSD's ~10000 employees.
Or simply it falls into no one’s job?
The latter is deliberate. The former, maybe.
In one example, someone wanted all internal training, presentations, engineering documentation, internal policies, etc related to the use of AI to accomplish a specific goal.
I was temporarily assigned to be a kind of product manager for the project, so I have the best access to all the multiple departments with 100s of staff involved. That said, I have no authority over them. I don't know every related policy, who developed what training, what engineering documents exist in some random share drive.
It meant calling meetings with the project leads to explain the request. Then hassling them to hassle their staff to check all their drives. Reading through all that material to ensure engineering didn't screen cap PII while making a training slide or put security-sensitive details in an engineering document. There was no guidance on what is not releasable.
And we get maybe one or two of these requests a year for different projects. So it wouldn't be a judicious use of taxpayer resources to build a reliable system for answering these requests.
But having to do with this subject specifically, the pattern is so common and the behavior so blatant, the amount of looking out for each other is so absurd, that I’d reject any claim that gives them the benefit of the doubt that doesn’t come with convincing evidence
Unfortunately Wisconsin State Law only gives vague guidelines on this ("must respond reasonably quickly" or something along those lines)
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
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.
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.
44k hours is ~21 years. Beyond absurd
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.
Just what in the hell is happening in the USA?
They don't, e.g. [0], [1], [2], etc.
[0] https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
[1] https://neilwilby.com/2026/04/02/when-delay-becomes-denial-a...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/foi-department-for-int...
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.
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.
> In 2015, the Department of Defense told a Freedom of Information Act requester, who was asking for records on tools used to preserve data on seized devices, that fulfilling their request would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.
(15 million hours = over 1700 years)
> During a Thursday, Oct. 8, meeting of the Eugene Police Commission, Chief Chris Skinner said: “We reached out to the requester, gave them a heads-up that it was going to be a big number, and asked them if they’d like to collaborate with us on how they can narrow their scope, change their scope, get them to yes on something to release that, and they chose not to do that.”
But James Croxton, editor-in-chief for Double Sided Media, in an email Friday to Lookout Eugene-Springfield said police never made such an offer, describing how managing editor Mary Bell called to follow up on the initial request and was told by a records supervisor that the number of potentially responsive documents was 2.6 million.
“The call lasted for 5 minutes and 11 seconds and there was no offer to help narrow the scope or anything of the sort,” Croxton said Friday.
(Source - https://lookouteugene-springfield.com/story/justice/2026/10/...)
—
Or a further quote from that article says:
> Double Sided Media sought “[all] completed internal affairs complaints, intake logs, investigative summaries, witness interviews, audio/video evidence logs, and disciplinary notices issued to or involving Justin Peckels where findings of misconduct were ‘sustained,’” with the request covering an eight-year time period, June 18, 2018, through July 30, 2026.
The request also sought “[a]ll internal and external communications, correspondence, and logs sent, received, or maintained by EPD’s executive staff — specifically including Police Chief Chris Skinner and Deputy Chief — dated between June 18, 2018, and July 30, 2026, regarding any misconduct investigations, internal status, negotiations, discipline, stipulation, or certification of Justin Peckels.”
—
Contrast that with this statement from the posted article:
> The city’s response is beyond belief. In its response to the request on Monday, the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04. (A separate request by the outlet for similar records concerning a former police officer, Eric Klinko, was met with a comparatively modest estimate of $195,869.52, for a grand total of nearly $2.7 million for both requests.)
—
Charitably, Justin Peckels’ supervisory bandwidth appears to be roughly 12x that of another officer.
UK and EU politicians are also liars, but some are only so out of necessity. I see corruption here too, but I also see people trying to go the middle road and do what they believe is right. I do not see that in the USA.
An outside observer could credibly conclude that Americans actually favor corruption in many instances. Certain instances.