At Monday’s city council meeting, Councilor Louie Sanchez questioned the city administration about why it paid over $1 million in Inspection of Public Records Act settlements last year.
City Desk ABQ reported on the high dollar settlements last month. On Monday, Sanchez said it’s important for the council to know what’s happening with these payouts and to find out what the challenges are in fulfilling the requests.
Appearing before the city council for the second time this year to speak about this issue, City Clerk Ethan Watson said he had hired more people to help with the deluge.
Watson told City Desk ABQ on Tuesday that the city has hired 10 new people to help process the requests, bringing the number of employees working in the department to between 25 and 30. But, he said, that number fluctuates and training times vary from person to person.
“We are working very hard to get the people we have hired trained and it’s going to take a little bit before I think we start seeing reductions in the numbers,” he told councilors on Monday.
Last year the city clerk received 12,000 IPRA requests, with less than 1% resulting in lawsuits.
Watson said that each member of his staff has a caseload of 100 to 120 requests that they’re working on at any given time.
Per week, Watson said his employees can produce five to 10 requests, which is 40 per month and staff are asked to contact all requesters every 30 days.
Sanchez asked if there was a quicker way to respond to requesters. He said delays in fulfilling requests fuels mistrust among residents.
“What you’re telling me is there’s always an excuse why it’s too late…,” he said. “What we’re looking for is a good follow-up process that’s going to be able to help you and help the citizens of Albuquerque.”
Watson told the council that the biggest struggle for his employees is all of the redactions they have to do for law enforcement records.
“It takes time. You have an eight-hour lapel video, it’s going to take someone eight hours to watch that video,” he said. “Redacting that video can sometimes take as much as three times as long as the length of the video, and if there are multiple officers on scene for eight hours, there can be as much as hundreds and hundreds of hours of video.”
Questioning the process, Sanchez asked how long it takes the city clerk’s office, what their response time was to requesters, and how long it takes for the city to get complete requests.
Watson said the city clerk’s office has extensive written policies, but it’s difficult for them to project when an IPRA request will be completed.
“We do not, and the law does not require us to provide an estimated completion date after a request has been declared excessively burdensome…we work really hard to provide records in a timely fashion, but it is very difficult to project how long it’s going to take,” he said.
And that’s because once a record request has been made, they don’t know what they’ll encounter in the videos.
Watson told City Desk ABQ what would help streamline the records request process is if requests were more narrowed and focused.
Councilor Klarissa Peña, meanwhile, commended Watson’s staff and complained about how much work it was for her staff to produce a binder of documents for KRQE-TV reporter Larry Barker.