Since Inside Investigator went online in April 2022, we’ve filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. By myself, I filed over a hundred requests in 2025 alone.

That may seem like a lot, but FOIA is a journalistic necessity, particularly in a state like Connecticut, where public officials frequently won’t answer questions unless they’re statutorily obligated to by a records request. Regularly filing requests is also a good practice if you’re interested in using the law to find out what’s going on behind the scenes in government.

But how well did Connecticut agencies handle those requests?

Despite some recent unsuccessful legislative attempts to study how long state agencies take to respond to FOIA requests, there is little data available about how many requests agencies receive in a year and how quickly they dispose of them. Some agencies choose to provide data in the annual reports they’re required to submit to the governor’s office, but they are not required to do so.

The reports for 2024-2025 are not available yet, but the Department of Administrative Services (DAS), which collects the reports into an annual digest, has released its report on its activities. According to DAS officials’ report, the agency processed 632 requests in fiscal year 2025, issued risk determinations for other agencies, and also supported the use of GovQA for 32 agencies. The number of requests DAS processed is double the 300 it says it processed last year.

Given this information deficit, I find it useful to conduct a yearly review of requests I’ve submitted to state agencies (I’m excluding municipal agencies because the way each town handles FOIA requests varies much more greatly than the way state agencies handle them).

In reviewing the requests I’ve submitted, a familiar issue stands out: long wait times. I have multiple requests still outstanding from 2024 that saw absolutely no movement this year. And the number of outstanding requests I have from this year is double the number of requests that state agencies fulfilled (this does not count denials or requests where no responsive records were found).

For the roughly 19 requests state agencies fulfilled, I waited an average of 51 days for documents.

I’ve been waiting much longer for requests that haven’t been fulfilled.

I still have five outstanding requests from 2024. In all but one, I received no communication about request status from agencies this year.

On July 23, 2024, I submitted a FOIA request to the Department of Corrections (DOC) for a copy of all FOIA requests the department had received since January 1, 2019, as well as email communications with requesters. My last communication was a request for a status update in January 2025, to which DOC never responded.

Similarly, neither the Department of Transportation (DOT) nor the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO) ever responded to requests for a status update sent in January 2025 for requests submitted in September 2024.

I also submitted a request in November 2024 to the Department of Labor (DOL) for reports related to a joint announcement with the Department of Consumer Protection (DCP) about workplace inspections looking for licensure violations. In January 2025, in response to a request for a status update, DOL said it would take over a year to complete the request and an initial batch of documents could be expected within a few months, but they never materialized. DCP completed a duplicate request on December 12, 2025.

The Office of Policy and Management (OPM) has also not provided any update on a request for email communications filed on November 18, 2024.

I also have over 35 outstanding requests from across 2025 that have been pending for at least two months (I’m not counting requests filed within the last months). The earliest of these dates back to February 25, 2025.

Probably to no one’s surprise, the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (DESPP) accounts for a quarter of the requests that haven’t been fulfilled.

In one case, I filed six separate requests, each at a $16 cost to run a search, with DESPP for Connecticut State Police accident reports. DESPP filled one within two weeks. The others, which were filed in August, are still outstanding.

I have two separate requests to DESPP that are among my oldest outstanding requests, dating back to February 2025. Both of those requests relate to the death of Carl Talbot, who died in custody at New Haven Correctional Center in 2019 in what the state medical examiner ruled a homicide.

I’m not surprised that of the eight separate requests I filed with state agencies in February for documents prepared as part of a lawsuit against the state by Talbot’s parents, only one, a request for run reports from the New Haven Fire Department, has been fulfilled. Documents from the court case show unknown individuals in the DOC falsified documentation stating that Talbot was alive after he had been pepper-sprayed and piled upon, leading to his death.

It’s not the only falsification of state records listed in those court documents. While no one in state government has addressed this (and the statute of limitations has already run out), Inside Investigator still thinks this is an issue that needs more attention, which is the purpose behind the series of FOIA requests I filed.

All of those requests, which were for documents that had already been prepared and reviewed as part of the Division of Criminal Justice’s review of Talbot’s death, have been pending without any communication from the agencies they were filed with for roughly 300 days.

For my other remaining requests, which have been pending between roughly 300 and 61 days, I don’t necessarily expect that they all should have been fulfilled within that time frame. Some of those requests are large and complicated, and I don’t expect state agencies to have a fast turnaround time.

But what I do expect is proactive communication from agencies about how long they anticipate fulfilling a request will take, whether there are any adjustments that can be made to narrow a request in order to process it more quickly, and whether responsive records can be turned over in batches. I also expect prompt responses to questions about the status of requests. That has not happened in the majority of those outstanding requests.

There is one agency that deserves plaudits for its handling of FOIA requests. I don’t have a single outstanding request with the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE).

CSDE fulfilled three requests I filed this year, one in as short as four days. The longest I waited for records was 34 days. In previous large requests I’ve filed with the agency, they’ve batched records and turned over documents as they were reviewed. They’ve also been communicative about how requests could be narrowed to better produce records I was looking for, explained redactions, and provided links to publicly available data that might be responsive to requests. This is how agencies should handle FOIA requests.

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