Short staffing is behind a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) response that took Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) officials a year and a half to fulfill. Sens. Henri Martin, Rob Sampson, and Heather Somers recently reached out to the agency to inquire about the long response time to a request submitted by Inside Investigator reporter Marc Fitch in March 2023.
DECD told them that at the time the request was submitted in February 2023, “DECD had very few legal staff and a significant backload of FOI requests” and that this was the reason behind the 20-month wait time. They also added that they “are often in receipt of very broad requests that take significant resources to fulfill and contribute to such challenges.”
Since then, the agency states, they’ve hired two attorneys and a paralegal to process requests and work through their backlog.
Despite this, I have one outstanding request that’s almost 1o months old. DECD has fulfilled 2 other requests from the same time period and partially responded to another.
An increase in requests and a lack of resources are a common refrain from agencies when they’re asked about long wait times for FOIA documents.
But, even when those things are true, they can mask agency official’s desire to slowroll a request, something Connecticut’s FOI law makes possible because it only requires an agency to respond to a request “promptly” and adjudicating this requires a trip to the Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC), which is a significant time commitment and not always feasible for all requesters.
It becomes obvious that slowrolling is happening when, after months of inaction, officials suddenly produce documents following a threat to file a complaint with the FOIC. DECD has done this with at least one of Inside Investigator’s FOIA requests, producing documents a year after the request was filed and within days of being a deadline by which an FOIC complaint would be filed if they didn’t respond. And they’re certainly not the only agency to do so.
Too often, the lack of any real deadline by which agencies must respond to FOIA requests means that actual production of records is dependent on a requester proactively checking up on their requests.
Requesters also have a limited timeframe to file a complaint with the FOIC–just 30 days after a violation occurs. For long-pending requests, that 30-day deadline doesn’t just begin when an agency denies a request. It begins from the most recent communication a requester has with an agency. That means that, even if a request is pending, filing a complaint may prove problematic if there’s been no communication with an agency in the last 30 days. This can also create a perverse incentive for agencies not to respond to inquiries from requesters about the status of their requests.
It is true that FOIA requests have exploded in recent years, and that some of them are large and not worded well. But large requests by themselves are not a problem. Many of them are driven by a genuine desire to view large sets of information that, while public, public agencies do not make public-facing. As a journalist, I file many large requests myself.
Nor are public agency officials helpless in complying with a tidal wave of large requests or vague wording. They have knowledge about the records in their keeping that requesters don’t–whether search terms or timeframes will return huge amounts of unresponsive records, whether they’ll take years to process, etc. They are able to reach out to requesters and attempt to narrow requests that are too burdensome, a process that can be in both parties’ best interest. I’ve gone through this process many times myself, including with DECD.
Agencies are also able to release records in batches as they’re reviewed and approved by legal staff.
But, when agencies trot out a line about being overwhelmed by requests and understaffed, it’s most important to remember that FOIA is an essential tool for government transparency and accountability, and agency officials have a fundamental duty to take compliance seriously.
That duty demands they manage the resources necessary to carry out that duty accordingly, and not seek to shift blame to the public for utilizing a law that is the best, and sometimes the only, tool compelling government to answer questions.
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