We’ve finally received a response from the city as to why emails about Sam Adams wanting to take a private jet ride to Kansas City didn’t show up when we did a public records request. You can read more about it in this week’s news lede.
It turns out that while the Mercury requested the emails for September 22, 2008, the city only searched for emails for one minute on that date.
Hi Matt –
Just to close the loop, I spoke with Technology Services and learned the reason the email did not return on the first search. Though we had a specific date for the search criteria (Sept 22), when they instructed the program to search 9/22-9/22 instead of searching 12:00 AM-11:59 PM, it searched only the minute from 12:00 AM-12:01 AM. Lesson learned.
– Laurel
Laurel Butman, Principal Management Analyst
Business Operations, Office of Management & Finance
So: If you’ve lodged any public records requests with the city over the past decade or so, citing a specific date, you might want to try back a second time. Lesson learned!
Riiiight.
Honestly, I believe it. Having worked in the big old dysfunctional machine (City of Portland), public records requests were the bane of our existence and difficult to get everything. Not because people were hiding things, but because the electronic records systems were so screwy. Add in the lack of document standards (people would have important memos, reports, data, etc willy nilly kept in personal folders, on their desktops, lack of standard naming conventions, you name it.). It’s pretty much a disorganized mess.
However, in Adams’ office? I wouldn’t put something else going on as out of the question.
The story says you requested “email between Tom Potter and his chief of staff [Raglione].” Why does the title of this post refer to those as “Adams’ missing emails”? Sounds like the city found Potter’s missing emails.
For clarification: Potter’s email string included emails between Potter’s and Adams’ office.
And, and, what do they say?
For clarification: Your stories should be clear in the first place.
But then Matt wouldn’t get to use his “For clarification:” bit.
I think it’s his favorite thing to do.
For clarification: As someone that spends their entire day working on databases this is either the most boneheaded thing you can do (haven’t experienced government IT shops though, maybe they are really that bad?) or a fairly clever excuse.
The first thing you would do after getting zero records is check the date/time parameters. Unless zero records was a good thing.