Ann Arbor officials explain rationale for $33K-$45K cost estimate for releasing council e-mails
Ann Arbor City Council members have had the ability to trade e-mails with each other during 172 meetings over the past seven years.
To date, only a fraction of the e-mails have surfaced through Freedom of Information Act requests - and those e-mails have created a firestorm of controversy and debate over the legality of behind-the-scenes electronic deliberations during public meetings.
The city's administration says it would take hundreds of hours to retrieve remaining e-mails from past council meetings and create an online database of them. The cost estimate is between $33,000 and $45,000, according to City Administrator Roger Fraser.
City Council members - with the exception of Mike Anglin, Sabra Briere and Carsten Hohnke - balked at those dollar amounts last week and voted against releasing the e-mails to the public in the form of a free online database.
"I think we made a grievous mistake, and I think we used money as a very weak excuse," Anglin said of the decision.
AnnArbor.com has since obtained records showing the city's rationale for the cost estimates, which Fraser acknowledged in a Sept. 21 e-mail to council members are, "admittedly, little more than educated guesses."
Dan Rainey, the city's information technology officer, estimated it would take 172 hours of IT staff time to scan e-mails dating back to September 2002, when council members first started using computers during meetings. At $45 an hour, that would cost $7,740 in staff time, Rainey estimated, and it would take another $8,000 to purchase software. The total IT expense was listed at $15,740.
Stephen Postema, the city's attorney, said additional expenses include examining, sorting and redacting the contents of e-mails before they're released to the public. To that end, he suggested the city bring Laurie Foondle out of retirement to handle that task at a cost of $30 an hour.
Postema guessed it could take 600 to 1,000 hours to review e-mails from all 172 meetings - nearly six hours per meeting - and create a separate sheet for each meeting, explaining which information was blacked out and why. All total, that was estimated to cost $18,000 to $30,000.
Add the city's review costs to the IT expenses and you get the $33,000 to $45,000 estimate, Fraser said.
Prior to last week's meeting, Fraser and Postema recommended if the council went through with the creation of an e-mail database, it should appropriate $45,000 from this year's general fund balance, with $15,000 budgeted in Information Services and $30,000 budgeted in Community Services.
City officials also indicated it would cost the public considerably less to FOIA the e-mails. Council members were told by city staff it could cost about $14,000 to FOIA e-mails from all 172 meetings. That includes $8,000 for IT staff time and $6,000 for the city's FOIA coordinator and other staff to spend 400 hours reviewing the e-mails for purposes of redaction.
While it could take the city an additional 60 hours in attorney time to review the e-mails, the city has not historically charged the public for that cost, city officials said.
Anglin said he believes members of the public will join forces to file a flurry of FOIA requests for the remaining e-mails.
The city's IT officials say they have access to the mailboxes of all former council members, beginning with the group in office in November 2003 - but excluding three members of the 2008 City Council: Stephen Kunselman, Joan Lowenstein, and Ron Suarez. Their e-mails and network files were deleted, inadvertently, by an IT staff member in January, the city said.
Rainey said there are six archived e-mail boxes of former council members, 11 current e-mail boxes for current members and the e-mail box that belongs to Judge Chris Easthope, which may still contain content from his time as a council member.
Council e-mails are currently the subject of a pending lawsuit. The Great Lakes Environmental Law Center and two downtown businesses are suing the city, claiming council members violated the state's Open Meetings Act on Feb. 17 when they secretly traded e-mails during a meeting about an underground parking structure project on Fifth Avenue.
Ryan J. Stanton covers government for AnnArbor.com. Reach him at ryanstanton@annarbor.com or 734-623-2529.
Comments
redeye
Mon, Oct 5, 2009 : 6:11 p.m.
MrMicrophone: Thanks. So... I'm not really a Microsoft guy. But I read that Access can pull data from Outlook. I tried it and it was pretty simple to get a table containing all the emails from a folder in Outlook. A few clicks through a wizard then just let it run. Then you'd need a table of start and end times for the meetings, and a table of email addresses of council members. SELECT for the records in one of the time windows and addressed to at least one other council member. So far, there's no manual "scanning" step. And no rocket science, either. From there, just print a report of how many emails each council member had sent during each session. Council members who hadn't sent many emails could get a text file of what they had sent, replace a few personal or sensitive records with explanations, run it by the lawyers, and then you throw the file up on the city web server and publish a link.
nofwte
Sat, Oct 3, 2009 : 10:41 p.m.
Can someone articulate what the purpose of all the FOIA's is? It would seem there is no important public benefit being served here (outside of the fact that you can prove to yourselves that you can do it). To compare this to other incidents (Kwame, etc.) presupposes someone is guilty (of what no one really knows)and is not, in most measures, anything close to a golden rule. Let's see how the A2.com staff would respond if we could FOIA all their email. If there are all these great/inexpensive ways to review email - why not (in the spirit of transparency) add their email accounts to the review. GOT ANYTHING TO HIDE? Now the A2.com "staff" want to you to do their bidding by deluging city hall with FOIA requests. Great, let's just make a bigger mess. Please keep in mind these people are NOT real journalists and probably are more interested in making a name for themselves personally. They are just fishing for a scandal where one probably doesn't exist. After all it is not like Ann Arbor, the state of Michigan or even our country have any "bigger" problems than this. Thanks to you all (Ryan,Edward,Jen) for keeping Ann Arbor a "small town".
MrMicrophone
Sat, Oct 3, 2009 : 6:53 p.m.
Redeye - I had a friend who left the city IT Dept back in the early summer. They use Microsoft Exchange. Not sure what version though. Exchange 2003, I believe.
redeye
Thu, Oct 1, 2009 : 5:33 p.m.
Does anyone know what email system the city uses?
sottovoce
Thu, Oct 1, 2009 : 3:04 p.m.
Why does it take 400hrs for FOIA office & 1000hrs for "retireees"? Also, how much will it cost to comply with all future FOIA requests? If that cost is close to the automated software system, I say go for the software.
Jerome
Thu, Oct 1, 2009 : 1:15 a.m.
Stop the DECEPTION. Why is Council so concerned about the release of these emails? I believe calmic (see above) said it the best, "The reason the city council holds open meetings when it votes is so that the voting public will be able to hear the ratioanale for the decisions that are being made. If the real decision-making is taking place in private -- than we are being deceived. We do not know the real reasons, the "hidden agenda". That is not acceptable in our democratic system."
nofwte
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 10:57 p.m.
Ridiculous waste of time and public resources....
1bit
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 10:06 p.m.
Ryan - the simple solution has been mentioned above. Each Council Members archived messages would be queried by receipient (i.e. other Council Members) and date/time (i.e. the meetings in question). The output would be then be exported to a.DOC or.PDF file. There would be no need to string the emails into a "conversation" as that would be the job of anyone interested in looking at the messages (and the emails likely saved a 'thread' of the conversation anyway). There would be no need for redaction, as Mr. Vielmetti suggests, because I sincerely doubt the Council was trading social security numbers or protected health information. And even if they were, if these are A2 email addresses then there should have been no assumption of privacy. But as also noted above, this is mostly a pointless exercise. I support the release of the information only inasmuch as doing it in the manner above is less expensive than fighting a legal battle over it.
Marvin Face
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 2:18 p.m.
Ryan, less expensive solution:. We could outsource it to China or India. I hear there are 12 year olds there who will do it for like 6 cents a day if you provide them with a clean concrete floor. They'll even work 16 hour days.
jeff4179
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 2:06 p.m.
Who cares. Agree entirely with LA's post.
treetowncartel
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 10:58 a.m.
I said before they should use High School co-op students. Pay them a small living wage without benefits, let them get some credits for school and learn about politics at the same time.
Ryan J. Stanton
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 10:40 a.m.
The A2Politico blog proposes using interns to do the work: http://www.a2politico.com/?p=646 Anybody else have any thoughts on a specific, less-costly solution, you'd care to throw out? We're listening.
mrk
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 10:03 a.m.
People always forget about fringes. I'm sure the $45/hour includes fringe benefits, so they probably make closer to $30-35/hour in wages.
calmic
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 8:52 a.m.
The reason the city council holds open meeting when it votes is so that the voting public will be able to hear the ratioanale for the decisions that are being made. If the real decision-making is taking place in private -- than we are being deceived. We do not know the real reasons, the "hidden agenda". That is now acceptable in our democratic system.
treetowncartel
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 8:48 a.m.
The e-mails will be produced in the pending litigation concerning the two business owners and the city's decision to build the under ground parking structure. It is pretty trivial and most likely nothing criminal, but you know there is stuff there they would rather not have out in the public.
LA
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 8:14 a.m.
The amt. of news, and SCANDAL these e-mails have generate is insane. So what if they send notes back and forth? Good grief! Where are peoples priorities?? OK. It was not a smart thing to do. OK. Maybe it overstepped a few grey boundaries... but GIVE IT UP! If they had wispered lame jokes and goofy remarks to each other would you all be asking for the complete recordings? Shall we put recorders in the bathrooms? Maybe they joke about some longwinded speaker or the bad tie someone wore. I realize this is Ann Arbor... known for serious micromanaging... but C'mon People! People are jobless, hungry, children are being hurt, elderly people are suffering, our streets are deteriorating, schools are losing funding, we live in an impoverished state... Is this REALLY worth all this time and MONEY!!!! Get over it!! Move On. Save your time, energy and money for the really important things!!
Bill Learned
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 7:18 a.m.
Why don't the city council folks use something like AIM, Skype or Google talk if they want to chat during meetings? Its free. And we could chat with them too! Or set up their own internal IM/chat tool. That way the attorneys could go crazy with all the chat recording and compliance regulations.
redeye
Wed, Sep 30, 2009 : 7:08 a.m.
Here's a redaction technology: Plain old ASCII text. One byte per character. If it's gone, it's gone.
nofwte
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 11:10 p.m.
Dear A2.com staff, You all seem appear to be like little sharks swimming around looking for blood. It would be enlightening to see how all your emails (including those from your staff meetings) show as well. Then I ask myself, what specifically are you looking for? Is there a specific issue you are interested in? What big issue of civic import are you looking to shed more light on? Don't give us that crap about the philosophic merits of transparency, etc. etc.. You are looking to embarass public officials because it will help your career and enable you to write for a real journalism organization that has an established business model. I would be much more sympathetic to your claims if you would live by the same standards you expect these others to... Thanks for keeping ann arbor a "small town".
bunnyabbot
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 8:03 p.m.
"...explaining which information was blacked out and why..." really, do these emails include national security issues? are the names of undercover agents used?, is the smoking man involved?
MrMicrophone
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 7:26 p.m.
For $33k-$45k there are a TON of well known, national vendors that could implement a full email archival and search tool, with money left over to spare! That estimate (for both time and cost) from Mr. Rainey is totally bogus. Maybe a better question is why the city doesn't already have something like that in place? I have to imagine this isn't the first (or last) FOIA request regarding city employee emails. Maybe the IT staff is too busy on Facebook and Twitter to be bothered with this type of work! Someone should investigate THAT!
1bit
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 7:22 p.m.
1. None of the emails are private or privileged - they are embarrassing. 2. The IT specialist is vastly overrating the time it would take to get these messages out. An hour per meeting? Absurd. More like five minutes. Yes, if you do the world's most perfect search engine and design it from the ground up it might take this long but don't be confused - this is Scotty telling Captain Kirk that there's no way the warp drive can be fixed. For something basic (non-searchable), this is not that hard of a task. 3. This is a pointless waste of time. What are people hoping to find out here? That the Council is full of sophomoric humor and inside jokes? That they have a clique and and an agenda akin to Survivor island? Just accept that these folks are humans who make mistakes and move on...
Ryan J. Stanton
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 5:09 p.m.
The following is part of a Q&A sheet provided by Dan Rainey, the IT director for the city, in an e-mail to other city officials. Conveniently, it answers some questions that have been raised here : Question: Knowing the exact dates and times of these meetings what would you estimate the retrieval time for this information? (Rainey) Answer: My estimate, based on an estimated 172 meetings (not including work sessions) beginning with the last meeting in September 2002, is one hour of IT staff time per meeting for a total of 172 hours @ 45.00/hr, totaling $7740.00. The 172 hours would be expended over the course of 6 to 8 weeks based on the current staff workload and availability. That estimate is based on the time required to pull the data from the existing and archived mailbox files, configure and run a unique search for each meeting and then making that output available to the next person in the process. This is only the IT time required and does not include time required by other City staff to then review each meeting's emails, sort out duplicates, redact any communications or content considered private, privileged or otherwise exempt from publication or the staff time to post the final set of a meeting's emails onto our "Legislative Search" website. Question: Since this resolution is intended to make the information readily available to the public what format would you recommend?...the resolution uses the term machine ready...please advise on this important issue.(Rainey) Under the current City process for producing a digital response, each FOIA'd email is first printed and then reviewed by staff, with any non-conforming information being redacted by hand (by blacking out the content with a marker). A PDF file can then created by scanning all of the "hand" redacted documents into a single file. The output produced is a non-searchable PDF file that is technically machine readable, but not searchable. If a searchable format is desired then the City would need to procure some sort of redaction software package. A redaction software package would be necessary to manage any redactions that need to take place so that all metadata that may lead back to the original content can be automatically removed from the final document, to provide an efficient workflow whereby less costly staff can perform some of the tasks associated with redacting content and so that an approval and auditing trail can be developed. The process to find the right software and develop the necessary business processes to support a more efficient and effective redaction and subsequent publishing process will take some time - approximately six to eight weeks in my estimation. This software package would run approximately $500 per copy and I am estimating a minimum of eight copies required.
mw
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 4:26 p.m.
Does that mean that they have printed out emails and they're literally going to scan them in, or that they are scanning through their electronic copies of emails? If it actually takes them 172 hours to retrieve electronic copies of emails for the past few years, they're really doing something wrong over in city IT. Also, $8000 for software? Just put them up in a zip file on a web server somewhere. There are enough people around here who would happily whip up an interface to the emails for free. Yes. $35-$45K doesn't pass the giggle test. There are two possibilities: 1) The city's IT is so mind-bogglingly inefficient that it really costs 10-100 times what it should (which, I guess, is *conceivable* given that we're talking about government work), or 2) Somebody is trying to use an inflated estimate as an excuse for not releasing the emails. Personally, my money is on #2.
Judith
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 3:45 p.m.
Here is how I feel about the whole Council e-mail affair: Who cares? This was the last so-called investigative journalism in the late Ann Arbor News and in my opinion it was a shameful waste of time, energy, and space to report on this trivial matter. A serious consequence of all the publicity was the loss of our good city councilman's seat during the recent election. I'm sorry to see annarbor.com continuing to write about this colossal tempest in a teapot.
Mumbambu, Esq.
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 3:13 p.m.
YEA! IT people should only get 10 an hour and fire fighters should get 200 an hour. How dare someone make 45 an hour and not be a doctor? And why did they become an IT person instead of doing something useful like becoming a fire fighter? Next we'll probably find out that City Council members actually get compensation for all the hours they put in.
essene
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 2:49 p.m.
Don't spend money on this kind of trivia. If they want to recoup all costs by charging users for all direct and indirect costs, fine.
Michael Christie
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 2:47 p.m.
can't they just use Facebook to post to each other's walls? For one, it's free, and if the content will be released anyway, then isn't it public to start with? Sounds like they don't want us to know something... I like the Kwame comment, thanks for the chuckle.
a2cents
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 2:12 p.m.
I recall it being said that the weakest, lamest argument in a discussion was "cost". It was a handy weapon to make challengers go away...
cmotdibbler
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 2:10 p.m.
Why not make this a class project for some high school kids? This is neither difficult nor time consuming.
Alan Goldsmith
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 2:08 p.m.
It could be contracted out for far less. Better yet, if this is the kind of advice the IT department is giving to the city, maybe the entire operation should be contracted out. And NO offers of early retirement either.
Brandon Dimcheff
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 1:56 p.m.
"172 hours of IT staff time to scan e-mails dating back to September 2002" Does that mean that they have printed out emails and they're literally going to scan them in, or that they are scanning through their electronic copies of emails? If it actually takes them 172 hours to retrieve electronic copies of emails for the past few years, they're really doing something wrong over in city IT. Also, $8000 for software? Just put them up in a zip file on a web server somewhere. There are enough people around here who would happily whip up an interface to the emails for free. I can't speak to the legal fees, but the IT stuff is way out of whack...
Stop & Think
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 1:50 p.m.
Boy or boy--IT people at the city make $45 an hour?!!! The Fire Chief doesn't even make that much an hour.... come-on people do the math.....people who save your life and computer geek---who should make more???? but it is much easier to lay-off the people who see you in the middle of the night to take you to the hospital than it is to lay-off the people who let you see all those e-mails that shouldn't be.....hmm priorities not in order!!!
Jerome
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 1:25 p.m.
Release the emails! There are reasons why we have Sunshine Laws. With 11 Democrats on Council and in the Mayor's office, this seems all the more reason for paying attention to Sunshine Laws. Heck, my State Representative in Lansing (Rebekah Warren) is married to my County Commissioner (Conan Smith), whose mother is my State Senator (Alma Wheeler-Smith). Now, I'm not saying this is bad, but again, there are very good reasons for Sunshine Laws.
djm12652
Tue, Sep 29, 2009 : 1:23 p.m.
I'm still not sure I understand why council members e-mailed during meetings...even if it was to each other, weren't they sitting within shouting distance? And A2 is not the bastion of National Security...nothing needs to be held back. what we don't need is a database. If someone wants a copy, print it out and charge by the page or time costs..