FOIA and Massachusetts Right to Know

I wonder just how much pussy-footing will continue to go on regarding this particular request and any others that have been dodged, evaded, or just plain ignored.

There was a request for information made by the City Council just before Christmas that, ostensibly, might've shed some light on the subject. The response from the City Clerk that will be transmitted to Council under item 8a of tomorrow night's Council Agenda doesn't, at first blush, seem to actually be answering the request, however. It reads more like an apology and explication of how overworked they'd be if they tried to actually list everything the way the Council seems to have requested.

The Council, however, didn't appear to be asking for how many requests for birth certificates, death certificates, or any other of the mundane records requests that go through the City Clerk's office every year. Rather, it specifically asked for how many "freedom of information requests had been filed by citizens in the past twelve months..." along with specifics as to dates of request and dates of response.

The response, in order to be fully accurate, should have simply been, "The US Freedom Of Information Act only applies to federal level records. The City of Worcester does not get any FOIA requests." That this simple and clear distinction wasn't even mentioned in the City Clerk's response, nor was anything alluded to in regard to the actual public debate ongoing with both the Mass Right To Know requests from Keven Ksen and also from the T&G's ongoing court battles on the Rojas files, belies any claim by officials in the City of Worcester that "transparency" is, in any way, shape, or form, their intention.

I call it "pussy-footing" but, really, it's just a form of "officialese" sidestepping that been used to frame the request and the response in such a fashion that absolutely nothing of any consequence is dealt with.

How about moving to have the City Dictator report on this question: "Since when is it illegal to take pictures in public in the City of Worcester?" Or how about asking the City Dictator "Since when are redactions like this necessary?... or even legal???"

The City Council continues to fail utterly in leading the way to a more transparent situation, instead enabling the expensive legal maneuvering that nobody can afford, nobody needs to go through, and nobody should have to go through in a free society. The level of BS and opacity in all of this is truly beyond belief!