Having been on the other side, the delay may not be a deliberate strategy.
Your question likely landed in someone's inbox. The work falls outside normal scope of the person's job. There's likely zero guidance on how to answer and an implication that the person is personally liable if they accidentally reveal something that legitimately should not be revealed, like PII. And the question is competing with many other priorities in their inbox making it easier to snooze it for another day.
This is not an excuse just an explanation. I was not aware of some of this until I got here. I try hard to answer thoroughly and with as much detail as possible. Sometimes it just takes a while.
Yup, the Milwaukee PD took over 6 months for a fairly basic records request, and that was even with me following up monthly to ask them for an update. In the end, the only cost to me was <$5 for the 2GB flash drive they put the files on.
Unfortunately Wisconsin State Law only gives vague guidelines on this ("must respond reasonably quickly" or something along those lines)
And this is when you get on each and every single school board meeting agenda and sit in on every single public meeting available.
You ask them repeatedly why there’s a delay in public record release. You ask them all privately at every meeting for an update.
Be patient. Be polite. Be kind. But be fucking absolutely persistent; especially at the public meetings.
They want to be a fucking obstructionist? No problem; be persistent and public. School board members are not generally career politicians; they’re largely single issue members who leave once their kids are done with the district or they move on to another office or area.
School board members don’t like political pressure from the public. School district administrators are largely shielded from the public. Make them feel the pressure.
> the Eugene Police Department claimed searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time and cost approximately $2,484,599.04.
Yeah, that's begging for a lawsuit compelling them to produce the requested records.
44,000 hours? For one individual? What are they doing, transcribing with quill pens, and they first have to capture and pluck a bunch of geese in order to get the quills? Even that shouldn't take anything like that long. I can't see any way that such a number is justifiable; they should certainly be force to justify it.
Any corrupt organization anywhere will do its very best to protect itself from reputational loss whenever possible. It just happens that in some societies, the amount of protection those organizations can provide to themselves without quick consequences is much higher than in others.
In the US, a lot of supposed government organizations are basically immune to pressure from elected officials. A police department can do more to harm the standing of a mayor than the mayor can do to said department. In fact, sometimes you even have state involvement to make sure the mayor looks bad. See, for instance, the wonder of the St Louis Police Department. The state votes in a different way than the city, and the state passed laws to take over the local police department. Thus they control budgets and leadership, even though the actual taxpayers that foot the bill are local. As you might imagine, this leads to very strange incentives.
That surprises me. When I worked in the Uk in a regulated industry, I observed it is very risk averse and process focused. I'm surprised the government can consistently turn around a response in 30 days.
Is there no organisation with power to police this? In the UK we have the ICO and if we're not satisfied with the response to a FOIA request we can escalate it to them.
I'm looking at this from across the pond, and I'm not convinced that's true. From here it looks like you have a choice between voting for the liar who says things you don't like, or the liar who says things you like. Neither will do what they say.
UK and EU politicians are also liars, but some are only so out of necessity. I see corruption here too, but I also see people trying to go the middle road and do what they believe is right. I do not see that in the USA.
At some point, we need to face the functional corruption of many of our basic institutions. Defund/Abolish the Police tried to force that reckoning, but no one wanted to hear it. This, in the same country that dismantled many of its own public school systems when racial integration was ordered, proving that such sweeping changes are possible when there is the will and funding behind it.
An outside observer could credibly conclude that Americans actually favor corruption in many instances. Certain instances.
People wanted it, the protests were historically big. It’s billionaires, the politicians they buy, and the people influenced by the media they own that are opposed.
I sent a public records request to my local school district on March 9th 2026.
They responded on 19th March 2026 saying they'd respond on in late April.
Since then, every month they've sent an email with some small portion of the records, with a PDF letter saying they'll send a follow up a month later.
I've received 8 of those responses so far, and there's no indication when, if ever, I will have received all the records responsive to my request.
Your question likely landed in someone's inbox. The work falls outside normal scope of the person's job. There's likely zero guidance on how to answer and an implication that the person is personally liable if they accidentally reveal something that legitimately should not be revealed, like PII. And the question is competing with many other priorities in their inbox making it easier to snooze it for another day.
This is not an excuse just an explanation. I was not aware of some of this until I got here. I try hard to answer thoroughly and with as much detail as possible. Sometimes it just takes a while.
Maybe in some cases, but not in this case with this agency (SFUSD).
The responses I've received so far from SFUSD (over several years) were each from someone whose whole job is/was dealing with public records requests.
One of the requests that was refused was for a Google Slides deck that was visible to all of SFUSD's ~10000 employees.
Or simply it falls into no one’s job?
The latter is deliberate. The former, maybe.
Unfortunately Wisconsin State Law only gives vague guidelines on this ("must respond reasonably quickly" or something along those lines)
You ask them repeatedly why there’s a delay in public record release. You ask them all privately at every meeting for an update.
Be patient. Be polite. Be kind. But be fucking absolutely persistent; especially at the public meetings.
They want to be a fucking obstructionist? No problem; be persistent and public. School board members are not generally career politicians; they’re largely single issue members who leave once their kids are done with the district or they move on to another office or area.
School board members don’t like political pressure from the public. School district administrators are largely shielded from the public. Make them feel the pressure.
44k hours is ~21 years. Beyond absurd
44,000 hours? For one individual? What are they doing, transcribing with quill pens, and they first have to capture and pluck a bunch of geese in order to get the quills? Even that shouldn't take anything like that long. I can't see any way that such a number is justifiable; they should certainly be force to justify it.
Just what in the hell is happening in the USA?
In the US, a lot of supposed government organizations are basically immune to pressure from elected officials. A police department can do more to harm the standing of a mayor than the mayor can do to said department. In fact, sometimes you even have state involvement to make sure the mayor looks bad. See, for instance, the wonder of the St Louis Police Department. The state votes in a different way than the city, and the state passed laws to take over the local police department. Thus they control budgets and leadership, even though the actual taxpayers that foot the bill are local. As you might imagine, this leads to very strange incentives.
UK and EU politicians are also liars, but some are only so out of necessity. I see corruption here too, but I also see people trying to go the middle road and do what they believe is right. I do not see that in the USA.
An outside observer could credibly conclude that Americans actually favor corruption in many instances. Certain instances.