Municipalities’ ability to respond to an increasing number of digitally submitted and AI-generated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests was a topic of discussion at an October 8 meeting of the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR).
During the meeting, ACIR vice-chair Steve Stephanou said that online FOIA requests coming from across Connecticut and around the country are ‘flooding’ municipalities and the requirement to respond to them is becoming an “unfunded mandate.”
Stephanou, who is also the town manager of Manchester, said that staff in several departments there are spending large portions of their time responding to FOIA requests “instead of performing critical operations” to improve town services. Stephanou added he believes there was an appetite to come up with a “better mechanism” to handle the problem, floating the idea of charging for online requests.
“Something definitely needs to be done because its pretty untenable right now.” Stephanou added.
ACIR chair Matt Hart, also the executive director of the Capital Region Council of Governments, said that the law isn’t necessarily keeping up with new developments in technology and that while it serves a “variety of important purposes and functions,” it can be weaponized.
“To be clear, many of us in municipal management strongly support transparency and open government. We believe press oversight and the public’s right to request public records help ensure that government serves the public effectively and ethically; FOIA is a critical part of that.” Stephanou and Hart wrote in a response to questions from Inside Investigator. “Our concern is that the volume and type of requests we now receive are consuming staff time that would otherwise be spent serving residents, and we want to make sure that the law is able to keep pace with changes in technology, particularly AI.
“Steve has served as Manchester’s Town Manager for five years. In that time, he has noted the ease of submitting FOIA requests, combined with AI platforms that can generate requests en masse, has led to a dramatic increase in requests and in the staff time needed to respond to them.” they continued.
To date in 2026, they said Manchester has received 424 formal FOIA requests, which have come from a number of states, including California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin.
“Many requests are very broad in scope and require substantial staff time, first to work with requesters to clarify what they are looking for, and then to compile the responsive records.” they added.
As an example, they shared language from a recent request submitted to the Manchester Police Department that sought all written pursuit reports, canine deployment records, use of force reports, body-worn and dashcam pursuit and use of force videos, and canine deployment videos for a period spanning over two years.
Though Stephanou mentioned the potential to charge for online records requests during the October 8 ACIR meeting, ACIR has not made any recent legislative proposals to that end and has not discussed plans for the 2027 legislative session. Hart and Stephanou said that they might discuss FOIA and AI-generated requests at a future ACIR meeting.
The topic of AI-generated FOIA requests was discussed during the 2026 legislative session. A bill aimed at exempting the residential addresses of public school teachers from FOIA disclosure also contained a provision to study the effects of mass-generated AI records requests. It ultimately did not pass.
The need to study AI-generated requests and their impact on municipal agencies was also raised by the Western Connecticut Council of Governments (WestCOG) in its testimony on a bill proposing to expand the state’s vexatious requester law.
“Because current law does not distinguish between natural persons and automated systems, agencies may be required to process these submissions in the same manner as requests made by real humans. This creates the potential for large numbers of automated or synthetic requests that absorb significant public staff time while providing little meaningful public participation, disrupt agency operations, and misuse transparency laws in ways that were not contemplated when the [FOIA] statute was enacted.” WestCOG wrote in its testimony.
That bill also did not pass.
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