Dear Mr. Parke:
First, I must apologize for the terrible delay in writing you. I actually started drafting you a lengthy e-mail about your GRAMA request about two months ago, then got pulled off onto other time sensitive projects and cases. I saved versions of the e-mail to my drafts folder, and then forgot to revisit and finish it. One (early) draft accidentally got sent to you this morning while I was trying to reboot my Outlook to solve some other issues. (As I’ve been meaning to get back to you for such a long time, I suppose my Outlook mistake is the universe reminding me to get to it!) Second, I apologize for the incomplete draft e-mail. You were on my “to-do” list for this week, but obviously not to respond in an incomplete manner. A fuller description of the issue we have is this: I spent 15+ hours searching and reviewing the Mayor’s e-mails. Construing your GRAMA request as written, I was looking for any e-mails that included any of the following search terms: Snowbird, Bonar, Cumming, Bass, Carl, Fisher, Whittekiend, Gygi, “American Fork,” Mineral, Tibble, gondola, “National Park,” “NPS,” “Forest Service,” or “USFS.” I then manually reviewed each of the items containing any of those search terms to see whether they fell in the category of “correspondence that has happened,” which I took to mean more than just, for example, “e-mail to/from” or “e-mail about,” and instead closer to “e-mail between” or “e-mail relating to.” That manual review resulted in over 500 e-mails. The vast majority of those e-mails are (i) calendar invitations for meetings or (ii) materials sent to numerous people (say, 20-50 on a committee) by none of the parties you requested I look for, but including or copying one of more of them, containing agendas, drafts, notes, etc. I found less than 10-15 e-mails that were actually sent by the Mayor to, or to the Mayor from, any of the individuals you requested I look for (and, almost without exception, those were sent to a large collection of people, again maybe 10-20). At least two of those are private under GRAMA (as they simply express condolences for the death of the Mayor’s mother). Others contain information not subject to GRAMA or personal identifiers of some recipients. Still others are, as far as I can tell, not at all what you are looking for (e.g., a reference to gondolas on a possible trip to Switzerland or the unauthorized cutting of old growth trees on USFS property in July 2015). In order to produce all the e-mails to you, I would need to print each out manually. Calendar invitations cannot be printed in bulk from our Outlook, and e-mails with attachments have to be printed individually with each of the attachments, one by one, or they get out of order (or crash my e-mail). Then, once the e-mails are all printed, I would need to scan them to .pdf and redact them for personal identifiers (private e-mail addresses, home addresses, cell numbers, etc.) as required by County ordinance. We would then need to review them again, in substance, and redact anything not subject to GRAMA. Given the volume, and based on past experience, I would estimate it would take my assistant and me the better part of three days. Because you are not the press, and because there is no way to do this without taking up substantial time and County resources, our office would generally charge both for copying costs and for the time spent (calculated using the least expensive qualified person’s hourly rate). On your GRAMA request, however, you did not pre-authorize anything for costs. So, I can prepare an estimate for you relating to costs or we can work together to find a way to reduce the amount of paper/time involved to a level where the burden is not so extraordinary. If, for example, you wanted only e-mails sent by the Mayor to, or to the Mayor from, any of the individuals you requested, that I can do much, much faster. If there is a particular type of e-mail you want, such as no mass scheduling requests or no e-mails to 20+ people, that will take me a little longer but will not take as much time as the full collection. Please let me know how you want me to proceed and I will get it done as quickly as I can. You were so gracious to say earlier that time was not of the essence, but I know neither you nor I anticipated it taking this long or being this large. I want to get this done for you ASAP. I look forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
Darcy M. Goddard Deputy District Attorney
Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office
2001 S. State Street, Room S3-600
Salt Lake County, Utah 84190
Telephone: 385.468.7761
Facsimile: 385.468.7800
120915 DMG ltr (w encl) Parke-Allen GRAMA request
Documents to follow.
We received irrelevant materials, piano recital information, South Jordan River project responses, very little that was remotely relevant to our request.
We have asked for Mayor McAdams calendar for August and September 2013.