As in, the email was misrouted?
Or simply it falls into no one’s job?
The latter is deliberate. The former, maybe.
Or simply it falls into no one’s job?
The latter is deliberate. The former, maybe.
In one example, someone wanted all internal training, presentations, engineering documentation, internal policies, etc related to the use of AI to accomplish a specific goal.
I was temporarily assigned to be a kind of product manager for the project, so I have the best access to all the multiple departments with 100s of staff involved. That said, I have no authority over them. I don't know every related policy, who developed what training, what engineering documents exist in some random share drive.
It meant calling meetings with the project leads to explain the request. Then hassling them to hassle their staff to check all their drives. Reading through all that material to ensure engineering didn't screen cap PII while making a training slide or put security-sensitive details in an engineering document. There was no guidance on what is not releasable.
And we get maybe one or two of these requests a year for different projects. So it wouldn't be a judicious use of taxpayer resources to build a reliable system for answering these requests.
State agency resources are finite. I know my small town had to jack up property rates like crazy this year just to make its slim budget (it's the largest source of revenue, and the 2d is sales tax, which is unfortunately in the toilet thanks to several ruinous federal policies causing people to spend less and fewer people to come as tourists).
If we got FOIA requests, lol, it would take years to respond and would be so expensive. We don't even have a city attorney position. It's contracted out to a law firm because it's cheaper.
Some big FOIA request would cost us an insane amount of money through no fault of our own. Our voters don't want to pay higher taxes, so that's the state of things.
So the alternative is to act against the law and not answer FOIA requests? You should demand high enough taxes to fulfill your obligations. If voters are unhappy about their height, they should elect people who make different laws the next time.