Email and Written Communication Requests

Good afternoon Laura,

The request below was forwarded to my attention as the Town's Records Access
Officer.

I write today to seek additional clarity regarding your request.

The first two elements of the request are seemingly only bounded by date and
to/from parties, but are missing subject matter or key words of interest;
however, the third element of your request introduces a reasonable
description of the subject matter and key word terminology upon which to
define the parameters of our archival search. To remove any ambiguity, I
wanted to confirm the same subject matter and topics of interest listed in
the third element indeed applied to the first two elements of your request.
Thanks,

Jim

James Feeney

Assistant Town Manager

Town of Arlington

730 Massachusetts Avenue

Arlington, MA 02476

(781) 316-3010
@Arlingtonmagov

Thank you Laura for clarifying, I appreciate it.

I am on vacation next week, but will send this request to IT so they can
begin processing the necessary searches in our archiver and export the
results for me to review upon my return.

I suspect there will be hundreds of mail messages that satisfy the criteria
laid out in your three requests. Further, understanding the nature of
communications between the Town Manager and Police Chief, I imagine there
will be much sensitive information, be it personnel discussions, incident
reports, or other personal information that will need to be reviewed to
determine what may be subject to segregation, redaction or withholding in
order to prevent any unlawful release. Much of this work will need to be
completed by Counsel.

It is the broad, blanket-type requests unconfined to specific subject matter
and requiring a complete duplication of a category of records for review
that often present the greatest strain on public resources. In light of
this, while the Town almost always satisfies records request free of charge
in the interest of transparency and public access, this particular request
may ultimately require a cost be passed on to you as the requestor given its
broad nature.

With regards to your various record requests to date for specific and
well-defined records regarding a matter of public interest, it has been more
than reasonable for the Town to absorb the costs associated with using
outside labor counsel and an IT consultant; however, while I hoped to be
able to continue doing so, it is more difficult to exercise the public
interest justification in waiving all costs associated with expenditure of
public resources when only categories of records are sought irrespective of
any particular topic or subject matter.

Unless and until I understand the universe of correspondence that will need
to be reviewed, I will not know for certain what the associated costs may
be, or if they will need to be passed on. If so, I will of course provide a
detailed estimate. I just wanted to put this out there in advance.

For now though, I am certain we will require additional time to produce
records responsive to your three requests. Accordingly, consistent with the
relief provided for in G.L. c.66 §10(b)(vi), non-exempt records or portions
thereof will be provided on or before Friday, July 26th.

I will be back in touch as soon as I have more information.

Sincerely,

Jim

James Feeney

Assistant Town Manager

Town of Arlington

730 Massachusetts Avenue

Arlington, MA 02476

(781) 316-3010
@Arlingtonmagov

Good afternoon Laura,

I am in midst of processing this email request, as well the request
pertaining to Bongiorno/AHRC emails.

An IT consultant has completed the requested searches and exported search
results from our email archiver; for both requests, nearly 1000 messages
were captured.

For your first request, I have spent a number of hours diligently sorting
the messages into more manageable categories. This is necessary because much
of the correspondence may be subject to certain exemptions, while other
messages need only simple redactions of personal email addresses and cell
phone numbers of private citizens. This is a bit of an arduous process as
the email archiver exports each message individually, even if it is a
component part of a longer thread.

I write today to let you know that I will begin transmitting batches of
email correspondence tomorrow. I will be sending PDF files as attachments to
separate email messages (addressed to both email addresses on this email)
with brief descriptions. I wanted you to be aware of this so as to not seem
I was spamming you. If I run into file size restrictions, I may need to send
hosted file links.

Sincerely,

Jim

James Feeney

Assistant Town Manager

Town of Arlington

730 Massachusetts Avenue

Arlington, MA 02476

(781) 316-3010
@Arlingtonmagov

Hi Laura,

Please find attached a file containing correspondence between the Town
Manager and JGPR Principal John Guilfoil.

I want to note that certain messages were captured multiple times in the
searches associated with this same request. An effort was made to reduce
duplicates to facilitate transmission and ease understanding, but some
certainly may have made it through into multiple files.

Sincerely,

Jim

Hi Laura,

Please find attached a file containing correspondence between Fred Ryan and
Adam Chapdelaine.

I will note some emails are being reviewed by Counsel and will be addressed
in a later transmission.

Sincerely,

Jim

Hi Laura,

Please find attached a file containing emails captured in the keyword search
that I was able to identify as 'mass distributions'.

The senders were identified and all of their emails culled out from the
search results to facilitate review. Although responsive, I suspect these
may not be of much interest given their lack of local context.

Sincerely,

Jim

Hi Laura,

Please find attached a file containing correspondence containing key words
during the month of September 2018.

Sincerely,

Jim

Hi Laura,

Please find attached a file containing correspondence containing key words
from October 2018.

Sincerely,

Jim

Hi Laura-

Is it just this particular file, or all 5 that I transmitted? They all had
.pdf file extensions, but were organized as portfolios for viewing. Either
way, I can explore sending in another manner in the morning.

Jim

Hi Laura,

I just went through and extracted all of the individual files from the PDF
Portfolios, and then combined the resulting individual files from each into
a single .pdf.

I am attempting to transmit the 5 new files now.

Let me know if this format works for you-

Jim

Thanks for confirming, Laura.

I am realizing now this process has taken the emails out of chronological
order. In the portfolio, the appear chronologically and are organized as
they would appear in Outlook or some other mail client interface. But,
extracting them gives them all the same creation date, so the operating
system just organizes them alphabetically by the assigned file name, which
is void of any date or time factor. This will at times strip the underlying
context as well as make threaded conversations difficult to follow as the
files jump around. I will see if I can identify a workaround on later files.

Jim

Good afternoon Laura,

Here is another batch of correspondence containing emails from Nov 18-Feb
19. I spent some time manually rearranging the files so they would appear
mostly chronological when combined.
Thanks,

Jim

Good morning Laura,

This is the only piece of hardcopy correspondence identified to date, which
was received by this office via USPS service.
Thanks,

Jim

Good morning Laura,

Attached please find another batch of correspondence from March 2019.

Sincerely,

Jim

Hello Laura,

Attached please find another batch of correspondence from May 2019.
Best,

Jim

James Feeney

Assistant Town Manager

Town of Arlington

730 Massachusetts Avenue

Arlington, MA 02476

(781) 316-3010
@Arlingtonmagov

Thank you Laura.

Here is another batch of correspondence, primarily from April 2019. Some
earlier emails that had been set aside for further review previously have
been added to the file.

I am presently working on the last approximately 200 pages of correspondence
associated with this request. Due to the necessary and assured
confidentiality associated with individual community members' participation
in the Restorative Justice process, you will begin to notice additional
redactions aimed at protecting the identities of those community members.
Organizing, converting, and carefully reviewing the content and applying the
redactions is an arduous process, so I appreciate your patience.

This should be completed in the next couple of business days, at which time
I will begin focusing my efforts on your newer request re: HCA and the HRC.
I will note the results generated by the searches performed by IT totaled
nearly 2000 pieces of mail. This could present a burden. Once I have had the
chance to understand the universe of results, I may be back in touch about
ways to agreeably narrow the scope, while still ensuring you gain access to
the information you seek.

Sincerely,

Jim

Hello Laura,

Attached please find the 3 batches of correspondence. They are as follows:

1. Messages which included attorneys, but did not trigger attorney-client
privilege. Please note there are 30 emails being withheld in their entirety
as privileged attorney-client communications, including 9 messages with Town
Counsel Doug Heim and 21 messages with Labor Counsel at Valerio, Dominello &
Hillman.

2. Correspondence primarily from June 2016 redacted pursuant to G. L. c. 4,
§ 7(26)(c).

3. Correspondence by and between RJ Circle participants that have redactions
aimed at maintaining the confidentiality of community member (including
names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, personal and/or
identifying information) as described below in accordance with G. L. c. 4,
§ 7(26)(c) and (f).

Please note these will be the final transmissions regarding this record
request.

Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Jim