Manhattan borough president emails

Dear Mr. Aaron,

This will acknowledge receipt of your FOIL request of May 5, 2015 for "...copies of all correspondence to or from Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer or to from personnel in her office..." "...referencing or pertaining to 2015 and 2014 appointments to Manhattan Community Boards."

Firstly, I interpret your request to be for correspondence pertaining to 2015 or 2014 appointments. With that, please be advised that your request will require a massive search, including the review of emails of numerous employees of the Manhattan Borough President over a sixteen month period. I estimate that this search will require approximately 65 business days to complete. In addition, the requested documents will, I am sure, amount to many hundreds of pages, for which, as you know, there will be a duplication charge of $00.25 per page.

I will contact you when the search has been completed, and appropriate redactions made, so that you can forward payment and receive copies.

Please do not hesitate to call if you have any questions.

Thank you.

Adele Bartlett
Deputy Gen. Counsel; Housing Policy Analyst
Office of Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer
1 Centre Street, 19th Fl.
New York, New York 10007
212-669-8139
Cell: 917-648-2906
abartlett@manhattanbp.nyc.gov

This message and its attachments are sent by the MBPO legal department and may contain information that is confidential and protected by privilege from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, you are prohibited from printing, copying, forwarding, or saving this email and any attachments. Please notify the sender immediately if you believe that you are not the intended recipient.

Dear Mr. Baron,

Thank you for your query regarding your FOIL request. I apologize if my response was not clear. I estimated that, due to the fact that your request will require a truly massive search, and review of many, many hundreds of documents, it would require at least 65 days to complete. Given the number of staff members whose emails I will be reviewing, it may in fact take much longer than that. I cannot tell you how many documents, after review to make sure that they are in fact appropriate for disclosure under FOIL, will be involved, or how many pages it will come to. As I said in my original response to you, I expect that it will be many hundreds of pages, and will let you know how many pages after the search and review have been completed so that you can forward payment.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

Adele Bartlett
Deputy Gen. Counsel; Housing Policy Analyst
Office of Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer
1 Centre Street, 19th Fl.
New York, New York 10007
212-669-8139
Cell: 917-648-2906
abartlett@manhattanbp.nyc.gov

This message and its attachments are sent by the MBPO legal department and may contain information that is confidential and protected by privilege from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, you are prohibited from printing, copying, forwarding, or saving this email and any attachments. Please notify the sender immediately if you believe that you are not the intended recipient.

Dear Mr. Aaron,

This is my third communication with you, to which I have received no response. Yet, I continue to receive form queries, ostensibly to “follow up” on your FOIL request. Those queries are obviously computer-generated. I now doubt whether a living human has actually received my responses.
Once again, your FOIL request is so excessively broad and general that it will require massive amounts of work on the part of our staff, and will generate a huge volume of pages – quite possibly well over a thousand pages, which will require payment at $.25/page before they will be transmitted to you.
Since, in your original FOIL request, you state that you would be “grateful” to be informed of the charges in advance of fulfilling your request, please be aware that I would be very grateful for a response to my communication, and in fact to receive a representation that you are comfortable with the payment that will be required. I believe such a commitment from you is only reasonable before I ask the staff of this office to engage in such a massive and time-consuming production of paper.

Thank you.

Adele Bartlett
Deputy Gen. Counsel; Housing Policy Analyst
Office of Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer
1 Centre Street, 19th Fl.
New York, New York 10007
212-669-8139
Cell: 917-648-2906
abartlett@manhattanbp.nyc.gov

This message and its attachments are sent by the MBPO legal department and may contain information that is confidential and protected by privilege from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, you are prohibited from printing, copying, forwarding, or saving this email and any attachments. Please notify the sender immediately if you believe that you are not the intended recipient.