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by Spooky23
2794 days ago
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I admire your mission and understand your approach. My only comment for what it's worth is that you may want to pursue a different path for these historical records. Using FOIL to access archival records is not a cost-efficient strategy for any stakeholder. In my opinion, as an observer with no skin in the game is that investing the legal resources you have and working with someone like the library association to lobby the legislature to fund digitization would perhaps be a more productive avenue. When I look at your website, and find the headline "CORRUPTION'S SUCH AN OLD SONG THAT WE CAN SING ALONG IN HARMONY, AND NOWHERE IS IT STRONGER THAN IN ALBANY" with respect to the city clerk office in a tiny place like Albany, NY. I take pause when I see that. A handful of old ladies processing dog licenses in a broke upstate city isn't clutching to old death records to help big companies, particularly for data they may not even possess. Albany is not NYC, and the approach your org seems to take is like bringing a stereotype to life. |
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The costs of records requests are entirely borne by the requestor. We pay for the copies (but only the actual duplication costs, no mark-up allowed), we pay for the labor (at the government worker’s actual salary), we pay for the physical media like a USB hard drive or DVD’s, we pay for the shipping.
All the clerk needs to do is agree that the Freedom of Information request is legitimate and not prohibited by any exceptions to the law. And for that, the government employee has free legal counsel available to them in New York, in the form of the Committee on Open Government (COOG), which provides free Advisory Opinions of questions of the law. They answer questions by both e-mail and phone within 24-48 hours, from both requestors and agencies. Other states have similar programs available.
So yeah, this digitization is actually totally free to the government. We bear the costs, not them.
...unless they ignore the law entirely, in which case they get the pleasure of paying for their attorneys, and our attorney fees too. We’ve won those twice so far.
(by the way, the “corruption” in Albany line is a song lyric from the musical “Hamilton”)