Legislative Assembly Fair Work Week emails

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Leg RecReq <Leg.RecReq@oregonlegislature.gov>
Date: Tue, Jul 9, 2024 at 10:27 AM
Subject: Public Records Request PRR 732
To: peter.fugiel@rutgers.edu <peter.fugiel@rutgers.edu>

Good morning Peter,

Attached please find an acknowledgment letter regarding your recent public
records request.

Before we begin the process of collecting any records potentially
responsive to your request, I’d like to share some information with you
about fees associated with records requests received by Oregon’s
Legislative Branch, and to that end, I have attached our fee policy. In
short, though: your request, as is, may qualify for a 40% fee reduction,
but it does not qualify for a fee waiver. To qualify for a fee waiver, the
request, among other things, must be narrowly tailored to preserve public
resources, which it is not as it seeks records from a two year period from
roughly 90 offices. Speaking more frankly, I can also tell you that a
search in our e-mail records collection tool of “fair work week”
unfortunately won’t only return hits with “fair work week” -- it will
return anything with “fair,” “work,” or “week” in it, which I’m sure you
can imagine will create countless (likely many thousands of) records that
are not responsive to your request and that will need to be sorted through
before we can provide you with the records that are responsive.

If you would like to read through the attached policy and can confirm that
your request meets all of the qualifications for a fee reduction, I can
proceed with the request as is and will grant you the 40% fee reduction,
but would ask for your patience as this request will take months of work to
complete. I am also happy to work with you to help you reconfigure your
request to be more specific (for example, by narrowing the search window,
or seeking records from fewer offices) so that we can grant that full fee
waiver. If we do proceed with a fee reduction only, I will make sure to
communicate a fee estimate before we actually begin processing your request.

Please let me know how you would like to proceed once you’ve had a chance
to read through the attached policy document.

Best,

*Michael Burns *|* Legal and Public Records Assistant*

Office of the Legislative Counsel

Office: 503.986.1243

[image: http://intranet/CapitolImages/Oregon%20State%20Seal%20-%20Color.jpg]

Dear Michael,

Thank you for acknowledging my request and sharing the fee reduction/waiver
policy. I understand the need to weigh the public interest in the records
requested against the burden of retrieving and reviewing them. I would be
happy to narrow my request by limiting the number of email accounts and
period of time.

Before I revise my request, I wonder if you could clarify how these records
(legislative email messages and attachments) are stored and searched for
the purposes of public records requests. I am surprised to learn that your
collection tool does not allow for compound search terms or operators (e.g.
fair AND work AND week). One way of working around this limitation might be
to narrow the keyword search to certain fields, e.g. the email subject or
attachment file name. Another possibility would be to search for records
containing relevant bill numbers (SB878, SB888) instead of common words.
But I'm not sure if you can search specific fields or metadata of these
emails. I would appreciate any further information or assistance you could
provide in tailoring my request.

All the best,
Peter

Hi Peter,

I’m glad you asked, because it gave me an opportunity to check in with the team that pulls e-mails for us (our IT folks are the ones who pull the records, while we review, redact, and discuss/disseminate them with/to the various concerned parties.) What they told me is that compound search terms with operators do (read: should) work, and that if I am seeing results that contradict that we can investigate why. Since I frequently see evidence to the contrary, I’ll have an opportunity to review with them the next time the issue comes up. It’s quite possible that user error (i.e. using operators in lower case instead of all caps) yielded nonresponsive records in the past. Thankfully we do always find the correct records (assuming they exist)... we just tend to end up with a lot of separating the wheat from the chaff, which isn’t practical for obvious reasons.

The tool they use, by the way, is Office 365 eDiscovery. It doesn’t allow you to limit what fields you’re searching in, but if you’re curious, this<https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/ediscovery-keyword-queries-and-search-conditions?view=o365-worldwide> article discusses the ins-and-outs of how to use it.

As for your current request: really, I can limit it however you’d like. The goal here is to make sure you are getting the records you want and are entitled to, so I’d like to make sure we’re doing it right. I’ll just need you to specify the conditions so I’m not misinterpreting anything. We can use your original search terms, and can also add SB###, SB ###, Senate Bill ###, etc. to the list of terms. The search will find hits in both e-mails and attachments. The biggest issue remains the number of accounts you’re asking us to pull records from, and the best advice I can offer is to limit your search to members of the Legislative Assembly and committees that actually worked on whichever bills you’re interested in. You’ll need to do the research on that if that’s a route you’d like to take, but OLIS<https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/bills_laws/Pages/previous-session-bills.aspx> is a great place to start.

I’ll await further correspondence. Have a great day in the meantime.

Michael

Peter, thank you. I will put in a request for the records and will get back to you when I have an update.

Micnael