Goldenberg Presses Mayor On FOIA

What’s a reasonable amount of time for the city to take to respond to a public-records request?

A mayoral challenger has raised that question as he continues to seek a decade’s worth of methadone-clinic-mentioning government emails that he first asked for nearly three months ago.

The mayor, meanwhile, stressed how time-consuming it can be to appropriately answer asks that cover such large topics and periods of time — especially in a city where roughly 10,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are submitted each year.

On Tuesday, Tom Goldenberg, a Democratic mayoral challenger and former McKinsey consultant, sent out a campaign email press release lambasting the Elicker administration for not being as open and responsive to the public as it could be.

“New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker has branded himself as a ​‘clean’ candidate, advocating for more transparency in government,” Goldenberg is quoted as saying in that press release. ​“However, New Haven is just as bad as Bridgeport when it comes to transparency, as shown in the high number of Freedom of Information (FOI) complaints to the state. Further, the city administration has withheld critical information from communities on topics like methadone clinics and safe injection sites. It’s time to stop competing for last place in Connecticut and bring real transparency into the city.”

That Bridgeport comparison, according to Goldenberg’s email and an associated op-ed, comes from a Hearst investigation from earlier this year that found that Bridgeport, a city of 148,33 people, has 253 open FOIA complaints, while New Haven, a city of 135,000, has 236.

One of those complaints has been filed by Goldenberg himself.

On April 12, the mayoral challenger filed a complaint with the state Freedom of Information Commission in regards to a public-records request he submitted to the city on March 5. That March 5 request asked the Elicker administration to send over ​“any government emails mentioning methadone, methadone clinic, APT, Lynn Madden, or officials from APT.” Goldenberg ultimately narrowed his public-records request to the time range 2013 to the present. (Click here to read more about Goldenberg’s critique of the APT Foundation’s methadone clinic on Congress Avenue.)

According to the mayoral challenger, besides receiving an acknowledgment of his request and a note from city Health Director Maritza Bond that she did not have any relevant emails to share, Goldenberg has yet to receive a full response from the city.

“A keyword search for emails with these terms should not take more than a couple of hours to retrieve, yet I have waited more than a month with no information,” he wrote on April 12. 

Weeks later, and nearly three months after he submitted the original request, that remains the case. (A representative from the Freedom of Information Commission confirmed for the Independent on Tuesday that that the commission has opened a case based on Goldenberg’s submission, but it has not yet set a hearing date and it has not issued any final decision on the matter.)

Mayor: City Receives 10K FOIA Requests A Year

In a separate phone interview Tuesday afternoon, Elicker, a two-term Democrat running for another two years in office this year, defended his administration’s response to FOIA requests more broadly — and to Goldenberg’s in particular.

He said that Goldenberg has filed three FOIA requests to the city that he is aware of so far this year. 

One was a request for traffic and crime statistics in the Hill. That request was acknowledged and the relevant data provided, he said.

Another, on March 5, was about government emails mentioning methadone clinics, the APT Foundation, and its directors. The city acknowledged receipt of that request within four days of receiving it, as is required by state law, Elicker said. Because ​“the original request was overly broad,” his administration worked with Goldenberg to narrow down the request’s time frame from 2013 to the present. 

And now, the mayor continued, the city’s IT department is going through appropriate emails and passing them along to the Corporation Counsel’s office for review so that the city doesn’t inadvertently release information with ​“legally privileged information,” confidential health records, or anything related to ongoing litigation.

Goldenberg’s third request, Elicker said, pertains to government emails over the last four years that mention safe-use sites and overdose prevention centers. His administration has also acknowledged receipt of that request, Elicker said, and is going through the same process of reviewing emails and making sure it doesn’t release legally protected information before providing a full response.

“We want to be thorough,” Elicker said, ​“and make sure that we abide by the law and don’t accidentally release information” that the city shouldn’t be releasing.

The mayor added that the city receives roughly 10,000 FOIA requests a year, well above the roughly 2,000 that Bridgeport received last year. That’s a lot of requests to go through, Elicker said, and it takes a lot of time to provide answers that our comprehensive and legally appropriate.

“We have done a lot to improve the FOIA request process,” he continued. Since taking office, he said, his administration has put in place a FOIA policy where previously there was none; it’s launched an online portal for the public to file FOIA requests where previously there was no streamlined and single way to submit such requests; and, just last week, the Corporation Counsel’s office put in place a ​“new data management system” to help it stay on top of FOIA requests. 

“We have full-time staff working on it,” Elicker said. ​“It’s a lot of requests,” and they take time.

Does he think nearly three months is a reasonable amount of time for the city to take to respond to a request like Goldenberg’s?

“The short answer is: we should be processing things quickly and, given the overwhelming amount of FOIA requests, we do things as fast as we can,” the mayor said. ​“Certainly, in an ideal world, we would be able to process them much faster.” But, he said, the changes the city has put in place during his tenure have helped. 

In a follow-up phone call Tuesday afternoon, Goldenberg disagreed with the mayor. ​“I think three months is more than enough time,” he said.

“It would be nice to know: What is a reasonable time to expect?” he continued. ​“Yes, they’re meeting the statutory requirement of saying they received the request.” But it’d be nice to get an update as it how long it might take for the request to be answered, about how many requests are ahead of his in the queue. Instead, he said, he’s received ​“no communication.”