The first open records request by Citizens for Responsible Government’s for e-mails didn’t work out so well.
So Ms. Mees submitted a second request. Upon submitting that second request, I received the following e-mail from Lisa Veldran, one of the two staff for the 20 City of Madison Alders:
At the present, my time is fully occupied in responding to other public records requests while also coordinating the regular business of this office. In order to provide Ms. Mees with a timely response to her current records request, I am asking that you, as the custodian of your records, contact Information Services to coordinate fufilling this request and to set up a time for you to review your emails.
I have attached the request to this email. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Thank you.
Well, ok. I don’t have time either, but I understand. Of course, this requires us alders to go in, during times that city staff are working, which is when most of us alders should be working at our full-time jobs. So I arranged to go in at 7 am this morning so I could get to work at 9 am.
Well, it was an interesting experience to say the least. This time there were 4,276 e-mails that had “district2” in them and another folder that I didn’t get a chance to look in. I started going through the first 400 e-mails which took about 45 minutes.
First, the annoying thing was that if someone sent an e-mail to all 20 of us, since that e-mail was received by 20 people, it showed up 20 times. Now, was I supposed to save all 20 of those e-mails to be given to the requester, or just one? I mean, I could save a lot of time by eliminating the obvious duplicates, but I wouldn’t want to be accused of not handing over all of my records.
Second, I didn’t see any of the e-mails forwarded to us from the Common Council staff forwarding various e-mails on the smoking issue. We received 2 – 16 e-mails attached at a time a few times a week and it didn’t appear that those e-mails were showing up.
Third, I was noticing that I was getting e-mails I had forwarded to another person and that person was replying, but the e-mails were only showing up once. So, if person A e-mailed me about smoking that e-mail wasn’t showing up. When I forwarded that e-mail to person B, that e-mail wasn’t showing up. Only when person B replied were the e-mails showing up. Why?
The final straw was when I was reading an e-mail from Dorothy Borchardt and I didn’t remember it. I read the e-mail twice and couldn’t figure out what was wrong and why I hadn’t noticed this particular e-mail earlier. Then I realized, it wasn’t an e-mail to me. It was to Cindy Thomas. (As an aside, I’m sure neither Dorothy or Cindy ever expected me to read that particular e-mail.)
At this point, I called the city staff person over and we agreed, it probably wasn’t a good idea to continue. It appears they will need to re-run the search and then I’ll go in again, but for the next two days they will be doing a system upgrade, so they can’t have us come in until Thursday.
It looks like if the same number of records are found, it will take me about 10 hours to look at all of my e-mails, that is a full day of work. Shouldn’t there be an easier way to do this?
On a side note, it is amazing how many times the word “smoking gun” appears in e-mails about Walmart, or Alito, or on various other issues.
