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(Editor's note: Each week, Mayor Robert Restaino issues a video proclamation via Youtube expounding on things he finds most importand from the week that passed. This week, he had special guests including City Clerk Elizabeth Eaton and Acting Corporation Counsel Thomas DeBoy.)
At the library they are getting ready for the holiday season. The first event will be a puppet show at 2 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 29.
About the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)
“We here at city hall work very hard to make sure we comply with all of the things we are required to comply with as a government and one of the things is requests for information.
“And that is requests for information in a formal sense and that is as you often read or see freedom of information requests.
"Freedom of information is the way in which other entities can officially obtain information from a government entity. It is different than emailing your buddy and asking for a copy of the latest whatever.
“We receive formal requests for documents, photo, papers, whatever it may be and by the way, those freedom of information requests come from a lot of different directions. They come from residents, who may want to know about a particular thing, they come from journalists who may be interested who may be interested in getting additional information about a topic. They come from lawyers, from law firms that may want to know something about a case that they are involved in.
“They come in for the department of public works, the fire department, the police department, the controllers office, the law department. They come in from everywhere. And guess where they come to? It not like every department has their own thing going on. And guess where they come to. They come to one person, one office, they all start in the same place.
“They come to this nice lady (gestures to clerk Elizabeth Eaton). She has a staff that works hard to get those things in. So all of you all asking for things from all over the place, it starts with her.
“And she has a staff that tries real hard to get those things done and we all know, the statute provides a certain timeframe within which to respond to these things. And to be honest with you, if we had a whole division of freedom of information responders, we would likely be able to hit that timeline always.
“We try real hard. There are times we don’t do that, we didn’t get there. And it isn’t because we are ignoring or because we want to violate a time frame. We don’t have any of that.
But there are things within these documents that the law doesn’t want disclosed. For instance, your social security number, other pertinent information that may be private to you.
“So she gets them, she has to sort out ‘OK, who are they asking for? What department? OK so they want to talk to somebody in this department so the email gets fired off to that department. That department collects all kinds of information that might have to do with that FOIL request but then something else has to happen. Then it has to go to this department (gestures to orporation Counsel Tom DeBoy).
“So why does it have to go to the law department? As I just got done saying, there are some things in those records that the law requires the government to protect, that can’t be disclosed. And so the law department under the direction of Mr. DeBoy has to go through, I don’t know, may be request Ms. Eaton emails out turns out to be a 240-page response. Mr. DeBoy’s department has to go through 240 pages redacting, blocking out, saving, whatever you want to say the information that the statute says should not be disclosed.
“I’d like nothing more than to tell you, like Amazon, we’ve got thousands of people who are doing this but unfortunately, we have the staff that we have who work very hard at this and that staff works very hard at this process of redaction, protecting and once that’s all done information gets out to you.
“Now what I am going to ask is for our city clerk, Ms. Eaton, so a FOIL request comes in, what is the first thing the staff does”
(Ms. Eaton now speaking.)
“Once the FOIL request comes in we process it immediately. Meaning there is a database that we use to give it a FOIL number so that our citizens are able to identify when they are asking for statuses and then what happens is within that 5-day timeframe we like to send an acknowledgement letter out just letting the citizen know that we got your request, thank you so much, here is an initial expected time that you should expect your response.
“Then we send it to the department requested they receive the timeframe in which they need to respond and send it to the law department.”
(Mayor speaking)
“So let’s say a poor citizen isn’t really clear on what department they want their request to go to, how does that get sorted out?”
(Eaton speaking)
“Often we call them and ask for where they intended for this to go because often times, they don’t know. They just simply don’t know where they expected this to go. I would hate for them to ask for a police report but if you don’t specify, I won’t be able to give you what you need.
(Mayor speaking)
“So you sent that off for processing. What happens when department X gets the information together. Do they send it back to you?”
(Eaton speaking)
No it immediately goes to the law department.
(DeBoy speaking)
“I have two attorneys who handle redactions. One handles police redactions. Strictly police redactions. The other handles all the other redactions.
“Each department has a FOIA liaison and when they process it all together, in the case of police it would be a collection of PDFs going on, quite often body cam footage and in the case of an accident, it may include an accident reconstruction file which is many, many megabytes of data, it is a mammoth digital file. So as indicated, the attorneys have to be very careful about redactions and so, believe it our not, body cam footage gets redacted now and so the faces of minors who are involved in a police interaction have to be blurred out to protect their identity and their privacy.
“So you can imagine it is time consuming. Once the redaction is done, the attorney signs a form and tries to explain in the form the reason for the redactions.
“So there are a number of different reasons for redactions and there is on the form a space to communicate reasons for redactions.
“Once that is done, our attorneys assemble everything together, now redacted and it is sent back to the clerk’s office to process and send out.
“And there is record keeping all along the way so that when the law department sends the finalized document to the clerk’s office so we know the date that happened.
“You guys actually record the date it goes out so there is a record.”
(Mayor speaking)
“So as I am listening to the two of you, there are those out there who think that somehow or another this is just some haphazard mix. There is a methodology. . . . and there is tracking.
“I listed in the beginning of this how many different entities might be asking for information.
“It can get overwhelming.”
(Eaton speaking)
I was looking for a way to streamline things in a way that we could remain compliant with the law.
(Mayor speaking)
We have a particular email address for FOIA requests and at some point, email requests for FOIL were coming from all over the place to individual staff members.
(Eaton speaking)
Unfortunately, sometime people don’t follow the designated process and they will send it outside of the designated email and as a result, we’re not able to process those things. It makes it very difficult when things are not streamlined or a process is not followed.
Editor’s note the video continued for another several minutes but bottom line: You can request information by emailing foils@niagarafallsny.gov
The clerk’s website is https://niagarafallsusa.org/government/departments/city_clerks/certific…
If you want to watch the whole thing, a certain cure for insomnia, here’s a link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCximNGKrVo
