Four staff members of the Pima County Clerk of the Board’s office spent all of Monday poring through emails asked for by District 1 Supervisor Ally Miller and redacting them as needed.
At the rate the office is going, the employees have months of similar days to look forward to as they work through 131,697 emails, part of what County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry called the “largest records request that we know about.”
That request is actually seven individual requests filed in mid- to late July by Miller, who is seeking the emails, voicemails, text messages, internet browsing data, social media messages, phone logs and other public records of Huckelberry, Clerk of the Board Robin Brigode, Miller’s four fellow county supervisors and other county employees. All of the requests also ask for communications with members of the local media, according to copies of the requests provided to the Star.
The requests come after a number of local media outlets, including the Arizona Daily Star, requested records from Miller’s office regarding a website set up by a former staffer. Since May, Brigode said her office has processed around 5,400 emails in response to such media requests, and is reviewing another 443 for a local outlet. The office is not reviewing emails for any other requests, Brigode said.
Emails and other messages previously provided to the Star and other outlets by the county show Miller regularly corresponding with staff members since 2013 via personal email and social media accounts, one of several measures she wrote were necessary to avoid the “prying eyes” of the county. She denied conducting county business with her personal email in a June 20 email to Brigode.
Huckelberry described Miller’s request as an “attack on the county” and possibly an attempt to deflect attention away from her office’s ongoing email scandal.
Miller did not respond to calls seeking comment on the records.
Brigode said she didn’t have a good estimate for how long it will take her office to provide all of the materials sought by Miller.
However, the office did calculate that, on average, employees are able to record the metadata and convert 77 emails every hour. That work alone will take more than 1,700 hours, according to analysis by the Star.
Additionally, between July 13, the date the first requests were received, and Aug. 1, the office completed work on about 4,400 emails over roughly 12 business days. If that rate persists, the work could take the vast majority of a calendar year.
Brigode did say her staff has been unusually busy with other work in recent weeks, meaning that more time may be available in coming months to respond to the requests.
“I would hope that we could have this completed in a more timely manner than what (the Star) projected,” Brigode said, adding that the county is looking for tools that could expedite the processing.
Brigode said it is fairly rare to receive records requests from county employees, and Huckelberry said it was the first time a supervisor has made such a request in his roughly four decades working for Pima County.
“Frankly it’s a complete waste of public resources,” he said, estimating that the final bill may be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars when accounting for staff time dedicated to processing emails.
Brigode said her employees have been logging overtime since late June, when the Board of Supervisors directed her office to help process outstanding records requests from local news outlets. Now that the work has shifted almost exclusively to emails Miller is seeking, Brigode anticipates that more overtime will be necessary, even though she said her $1.5 million budget does not include funding for it.
The four employees working Monday account for almost a quarter of Brigode’s full-time staff of 17.
“It’s using up a lot of our resources,” she said, adding later that “we have our regular business operations that need to be maintained.”
Jesse Rodriguez, the county’s chief information officer, said his office has also seen its workload increase as a result of Miller’s and other requests, including those submitted by the media.
Over the past several months, some information technology staff members have been doing records work full-time, in part because much of it “is primarily a manual process for both the clerk’s and my staff.”
“These have been just ongoing and relentless,” he said, adding that most of his office’s work on the matter is now completed.
Brigode, whose office now handles most county records requests, said that they will continue to help others seeking public records and can still process some quickly if they are simple.
“We’re trying to balance it,” she added.
