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County staff review public-records request process; board asks for more detail and to pursue peer county examples
Summary
Staff reported 75 requests in the portal (54 closed, 21 open) and recent time-tracking showing median staff time of 0.33 hours per request; commissioners asked staff to pursue additional examples (including Cleveland County) and to return with legal guidance on charging for clerical or supervisory time over four hours.
County staff and the county attorney presented an update on the public-records request process and the use of the NextRequest portal on May 19, reporting request counts, response-time metrics and preliminary staff-time tracking.
Brian Hart and Chris Perrier summarized the portal statistics: 75 requests logged (54 closed, 21 open), 31 requests with newly recorded staff-time entries, a median response time of 0.33 hours per tracked request and an average of 0.94 hours. Staff noted the longest single request recorded was about 8.5 hours (environmental/public-health material). The presenters said these figures come from the NextRequest system.
Staff reviewed peer-county approaches and told the board that opportunities to recover costs under North Carolina law are limited, generally to printing or unusually burdensome requests that require extensive use of information-technology resources or special-format deliverables. The presentation noted Davie and Granville counties as comparison points and that staff had not yet successfully connected with Cleveland County to review its approach.
Commissioners expressed interest in adding a threshold to the policy for charging clerical and supervisory time (for example, over four hours) and asked staff to pursue legal defensibility of such an approach and to try again to contact Cleveland County. Staff also reported a short experiment with automatically making requests public in the portal; after a user submitted personal data in a request that briefly appeared online, staff paused the automatic-public setting and said further controls or redaction procedures would be needed before making requests public.
The county attorney said he would provide an itemized breakdown of staff time and costs and that staff would return with further legal analysis and recommended policy language; the board agreed to continue the discussion until that information is provided.
Quotes - "We received 75 requests, 54 being closed, 21 remain open," said a staff presenter referring to NextRequest statistics. - "We can provide that information to the board," said county counsel about tracking time and cost per request.
Clarifying details - Staff noted that only recent requests (about 31 of 75) have staff-time logged in the portal because time-tracking was started more consistently only in the past month. - The board directed staff to continue pursuing Cleveland County's approach and to return with legal guidance and an itemized time/cost breakdown.
No vote was taken; the board tabled final policy changes pending further information.
