Inside Investigator recently filed a complaint against the Department of Environmental Services and Public Protection (DESPP) with the Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC). The complaint covers 15 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, filed by every member of our newsroom, stretching back to November 2024.
It’s not an action we undertake lightly, as the FOIC process is not fast and takes time and attention away from our reporting. However, as our complaint alleges, DESPP officials have a pattern of practice of ignoring FOIA requests for long periods of time. In public records parlance, that’s known as a constructive denial. And it directly impacts our ability to corroborate allegations of misconduct within DESPP, and report on them.
Recently, we broke several stories related to faculty misconduct at the University of Connecticut. Those stories were reportable because we were able to use FOIA to obtain documents and verify information we received from various sources.
FOIA serves a number of important journalistic purposes. For example, it can help verify information we receive from tipsters or claims made by public officials. Obtaining documents directly from public agencies can also be an important step in protecting sources who are sharing potentially sensitive information.
Failure to respond promptly to FOIA requests ultimately delays important reporting, sometimes until the consequences of misconduct becoming public are mitigated.
That’s why a public agency’s failure to respond to a FOIA request in a timely fashion, or “promptly” as Connecticut’s public records statute dictates, is also known as a constructive denial. Waiting long periods of time for important information is tantamount to being denied access to records under the law, particularly if you’re a journalist trying to obtain information and break a timely story of public significance.
Our complaint alleges that DESPP isn’t merely delaying the release of the odd FOIA request because their public records office is overwhelmed by the number of requests it receives. To the contrary, we allege DESPP officials weaponize long wait times to delay turning over information they do not want to.
And we have data that supports this claim. In January, as part of a broader project intended to learn more about FOIA wait times, I filed identical requests with state agencies seeking information about requests they received in 2025.
It took almost eight months and the threat of an FOIC complaint for DESPP to turn over their GovQA log. And, unsurprisingly, that log showed the agency has a huge backlog of records, receiving over 24,000 requests in 2025, many of which are requests for police reports. On average, it took DESPP 194 days, or over six months, to close requests received during that time frame. And requestors whose requests were still open, as of September, had waited an average of 353 days, or nearly a year, to receive records.
In Inside Investigator’s experience–and we’ve waited much longer than 353 days for the agency to respond to a request–that wait comes with absolutely no updates or indication that a request has been viewed or is being worked on. Under the law, agencies are required to acknowledge a request within four days of receipt. The acknowledgment DESPP and other agencies that use GovQA send out is auto-generated by the system immediately after a request is submitted. It does not indicate an actual human being has viewed the request.
In our experience, messages about updates on the status of requests are ignored, as are requests to turn over records in batches or prioritize time-sensitive requests.
DESPP, like many agencies, processes requests in the order they are received. But that’s no guarantee that certain requests still won’t be processed faster, depending on the types of records requested.
And interagency requests, which come from other Connecticut state agencies or other state or federal law enforcement agencies, are processed much faster than those that come from the public, are closed within GovQA almost instantaneously. The agency also has a separate track for requests from other government agencies.
One of the cornerstones of FOIA is that the law does not care who a requester is or why they are filing a request. So while it may be understandable that other law enforcement agencies need time-sensitive information quickly, it’s nonetheless galling that other requesters, who may also need information in a timely fashion and are entitled to it, are left waiting for records, sometimes for years.
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