The Chronicle‘s Lisa Viator writes an interesting story today, about how an entity — in this case HISD — handles open records requests:
“The public information request process is a valuable way to disseminate information, and also takes an enormous amount of time and resources,” district spokesperson Terry Abbott said. “But at any time and for anybody who makes a request, it is incumbent on us to go and find that information.”
Such was the case when the Houston Chronicle made a public records request last month for Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra’s salary and compensation information. It was made as part of a survey of school superintendent salaries in conjunction with Sunshine Week, a national program that underscores the importance of open public records.
That’s odd. Why wouldn’t this story say what an earlier editorial said: that the requests were filed by students on behalf of the Chronicle?
The request was one of hundreds the district receives each year.
Abbott said it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to calculate in the thousands the number of hours spent investigating public information requests. Understandably, periods of information request influx tend to coincide with network television sweeps in February, May and November each year, he said.
And HISD is routinely a target during sweeps.
According to district records, during the 2004-05 school year — the latest on which district number crunchers have firm statistics — 870 public information requests were filed.
The general public tallied first in those, filing in person or asking via e-mail or fax for 671 open records requests.
Houston media outlets were the second most requesting entities, filing 92 requests; education unions made 68 requests and the remaining 39 requests were spread out among schools, non-Houston media, government, military as well as one lone request categorized as other organizations.
Now, if we could just get local media to use the open records request process to look at Metro, City Hall, HPD, the Sports Authority, the Parking Authority…
