FOIA - Multnomah County Sheriff's Office - FOIA Logs 2018-2019

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the Oregon Public Records Law, I hereby request the following records:

Your FOIA request logs from all of 2018 and 2019, which I desire to include a field showing the date and subject of each request and a field for each respective final disposition.

I would request that these responsive documents would please be released in machine readable format as a spreadsheet (.csv or .xls)

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 10 business days.

Sincerely,

J Ader

Mr. White,

In the Oregon Open Records Law, specifically in the section '192.324 Copies or inspection of public records; public body response; fees; procedure for records requests.', the following is stated:

"(4)(a) The public body may establish fees reasonably calculated to reimburse the public body for the public body’s actual cost of making public records available, including costs for summarizing, compiling or tailoring the public records, either in organization or media, to meet the request."

Accordingly, I request a justification and itemization of the fees, given that the statute states they must be "reasonably calculated".

Additionally, I believe public interest to outweigh the estimation of fees here. It is important for the public to have a form of transparent posterity for public requests that have already been made and completed by public agencies. Many agencies across the United States already publicly share their FOIA logs on public facing webpages, and those who don't do so keep track of them internally, in a way where it is easily retrievable as responsive records to a request such as mine.

I look forward to hearing back to get a more granular understanding of the current fee estimation.

Regards,
J. Ader

Good evening Mr. White,

Thank you for the assessed breakdown of fees involved with my request.

Furthermore, the records responsive to this request will be used to build a greater public understanding of Oregon's decisions, policies, and standards involving the processing and history of public records requests with the corresponding release of documents. Public records themselves are obviously an integral tool for insight into government activity that affect the conduct of government and the lives of any or all of the people. The public release of the history of requests and their respective responses is an important factor in this transparency. As such, I humbly ask that the unduly burdensome exemption be waived, as the public interest greatly outweighs the burden on the public body. Consider that the burden is placed on the public body to show that the burden on the public body is outweighted by the public's interest.

Regards,

- J. Ader