New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
City working to improve FOIA response
NEW HAVEN — During an unprecedented period in which City Hall has been physically closed to the public, with many employees working remotely, emailed requests for information often have been the only way for people to get information they need.
While the city says its response rate to Freedom of Information Act requests is about 90 percent, some people seeking information
say the city, or at least some officials and departments, have failed to respond adequately to requests.
Mayor Justin Elicker — who was elected on a promise of transparency — and the city’s top attorney, among others, say New Haven has done its best to respond to all requests under the state FOI law and will continue to do so.
“I think that our staff very much cares to respond quickly and comprehensively to the FOIA requests that we get,” Elicker said. “They want to do it to fulfill the city’s legal obligation and ethical obligation to provide openness and transparency ... so that people can get the information that they need in a timely manner.
“I think it is important to note that this is a constant effort to improve what we’re doing,” said Elicker. “I’m the first to acknowledge that in many ways the city has a lot of work to do to improve our service to the public.
“... If people are not answering their phones in City Hall or responding” to requests for information, “that’s a problem that should be reported,” Elicker said. “City Hall should be functioning.”
The main issue, Elicker said, “is that there are so many FOIA requests and we’re understaffed. Ideally, we should have a greater number of staff to respond to peoples’ requests.”
Some people who have requested information from the city, however, said they got nothing — in one case, two years of nothing.
Guilford attorney William Bloss, who represents the family of Michael Randall Sr., one of two men who died in a May 5, 2019, fire in a house at 150 West St., said he filed an FOI request with the city’s Livable City Initiative “because a document from the Fire Department indicated that LCI went to this property” and he wanted further details. Bloss filed a lawsuit against the city for the family.
Bloss said that on July 2, 2019, he wrote a letter to LCI “asking for their records.”
He said he got no response for that letter, or a second one in 2019, or third letter in 2020. “Not one word — nothing,” said Bloss, former chairman of the Guilford Board of Education.
He subsequently filed a complaint last year with the state Freedom of Information Commission, which was docketed on July 30, 2020. He received an additional notice from the FOIC on Oct. 13, 2020, and is waiting for a hearing.
As a lawyer, “We do a lot of requests and I don’t think I’ve ever had a municipality just totally ignore a request,” Bloss said.
No “average request”
Part of the problem has to do with sheer numbers.
During a six-month period through early April, the city received about 400 FOI requests through its online portal, said outgoing Elicker administration spokesman Gage Frank. “This does not include records requested in any other manner or that are fulfilled in person,” he said.
About 90 percent of those requests “have been fully completed,” Frank said. He said it was difficult to pinpoint the average length of time it took to respond to request because there is no “average request.”
“Requests can be simple, for example a request for an easily accessible report,” and “those requests are handled in the ordinary course of business and are generally fulfilled in a matter of hours or days depending upon other departmental matters,” Frank said.
“Broad requests that result in hundreds or thousands of pages of records require much longer periods for compiling, review and, as necessary, redaction,” he said.
“The City of New Haven complies with the requirements of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act” and “to ensure such compliance, the city is considering a formal policy for managing FOIA requests, which will include departmental training on the topic,” Frank said.
According to Elicker, the overwhelming number of requests that the city receives “are from lawyers” looking for information associated with cases they are preparing, and “that occupies a lot of the offices’ time.”
Figures provided by state Freedom of Information Commission Director of Public Education Tom Hennick don’t show New Haven as all that different from other Connecticut cities of similar size.
New Haven currently has two open cases out of four complaints filed so far in 2021. It had 29 complaints filed in 2020 and 28 in 2019, Hennick said.
Bridgeport, by way of comparison, had 38 complaints in 2020 and 17 in 2019. Hartford had 18 complaints in 2020 and 52 in 2019. Waterbury had 14 complaints in 2020 and 5 in 2019, Hennick said.
Tracking requests
A portal for Freedom of Information Acts requests that the city put in place in August of 2020 in the midst of the pandemic has been misunderstood, according to Elicker and city Corporation Counsel Patricia King.
Frank said the city’s FOI policy “has not materially changed under Mayor Elicker. The mayor has encouraged departments to ensure transparency by efficiently responding to requests for information.”
Hennick said similar portals are in use in Bridgeport and Waterbury.
The portal, which some people seeking information interpret as another hoop members of the public are being asked to jump through before they can have access to information, is optional — and actually was put in place as a way to better track the many requests the city receives and make sure they are being responded to, said King.
“What was happening was that people were sending FOIA requests” directly to city departments and in some case they were getting loss in the shuffle, King said. But use of the portal is not compulsory, she said.
“They’re not required to use it, but it’s the best way for us to track the request and make make sure they’re responded to,” King said.
And “we really do make an effort to respond,” she said.
The portal became an issue in particular when people associated with various political campaigns, who had long been used to getting voting lists directly — and easily — from the Registrar of Voters Office, were told they had to first put in a request through the portal
But some of the people involved on both ends now say that was a misunderstanding — and Elicker said the city’s attorneys immediately contacted the registrar’s office to iron it out.
“I don’t really want to rehash that,” said Tomas Reyes, onetime president of the Board of Alders and former chief of staff under former Mayor Toni Harp, who initially felt like he was being to do some added gymnastics in order to get something he long had gotten with no trouble.
“Once I looked into that I found out that the people who gave me information had been given the wrong information,” Reyes said. “I think it was bad communication and the registrar of voters basically was doing what she thought she had to.”
When he and others complained, “They overturned it right away,” Reyes said. “I certainly was not interested in creating a problem for anyone. All I wanted was a voters list — and it was a voters list that had always been available to anyone who asked for it for many years.”
At this point, “that’s all resolved,” said Republican Registrar of Voters Marlene Napolitano. “The office is still closed, so what (Democratic Register) Shannel (Evans) and I are asking is that if someone has a request for a voters list, that it be sent in via email so we can have IT reproduce” the voting list as a spreadsheet.
People requesting voter lists or other documents “can still go through the FOIA portal if they choose to ... but we’re telling people if they want a voters list, that they submit an email to Shannel or I,” she said. “It’s back to a simple process other than that people are unable to come into the office.”
Frank said “there has never been a requirement that all public records requests be made through the city’s FOIA portal. Indeed, requests may be made in person, by telephone, facsimile transmission, email, or post,” he said. “... For tracking purposes, the city asks departments to reduce requests to writing and forward them to the portal.”
Patricia Kane, former secretary of the Quinnipiac East Community Management Team, said she also has experience with an FOI request to the city. She said it occurred after, on behalf of the management team, she made a request to LCI to let the team use some of a grant it received from LCI for community projects to buy face masks to distribute to residents.
After seeing a contractor giving away face masks, “We wanted to follow his example and save lives,” Kane said. She said she there was a precedent for it because another management team had done it.
“And we were denied permission — and I was a little upset about this,” said Kane, who was a volunteer on Elicker’s 2019 mayoral campaign.
The mayor subsequently released 8,000 masks from the city’s stores, she said.
“Once the city had given us the masks, we repeated our request and never got a response,” she said. “Then I filed a Freedom of Information request to LCI, corporation counsel, the mayor, asking in how many cases had LCI previously given approval to redirect the funds from the grants.”
It was then that she was told that she had to file a request through the new FOI portal.
But throughout it all, “We never had a response” to the original request, Kane said.
She said she hasn’t yet filed a complaint yet with the FOIC — and doesn’t think she should have to, given that “this is a mayor who promised transparency.”
Frank said that under New Haven’s policy, requests for access to public records “are fulfilled by the departments with custody of the requested records. To the extent that a department has questions about whether a particular record is exempt from disclosure, the department will seek the advice and assistance of the Office of the Corporation Counsel.”