Public records answered in a day, not a fortnight

The organisation

The Ridge County Clerk of Court office has fourteen staff. Three of them handle public records requests, and all three also work the public counter, which means records work happens between interruptions rather than in blocks.

The office receives about two hundred and eighteen requests a quarter. Statutory response times apply, and the office publishes its own performance against them, which is why the median turnaround figure is one it actually tracks.

The problem

A public records request is four jobs: find the material, review it, redact what is exempt, and produce it with a cover letter citing the exemptions relied on.

The office did the review on paper. Records were printed, read, redacted with a marker, scanned, and the scan was mailed as a PDF. That produced a file that was a photograph of a redacted photocopy — no text layer, no search, frequently poor contrast where the source was already a scan of a fax.

Half the office's follow-up calls were requesters asking what a page said. Each of those calls was answered by a person reading the original aloud, which is slow and is a disclosure decision made without a supervisor.

The exemption citations were retyped into each cover letter from a reference sheet. Retyped citations drift. Two had drifted far enough to be wrong, which was noticed by a requester rather than by the office.

What they tried first

The office's first improvement was a better scanner. It made the files larger and no more readable, because the problem was the marker and the photocopy, not the optics.

It then tried producing electronically using the same tool it used for everything else, drawing black boxes. The county's information security officer stopped that within a fortnight, having tested one produced file and recovered the covered text from it in about a minute.

A third attempt kept the paper process but added a typed index of what had been withheld and why. It was a genuine improvement to the cover letter, and it doubled the time each request took.

What changed

The review happens on screen. Exempt material is marked and burned in — removed from the page content, not covered — and the produced file is flattened.

The cover letter is a template carrying the request number, the date, and the exemptions cited, chosen from a list held with the template rather than retyped from a sheet. When a citation changes, it changes in one place.

Where the source was a scan, the record is run through OCR before production, so the file the requester receives is searchable even when the paper original was not. Pages are numbered across the production, so a requester and a clerk discussing it are looking at the same page number.

The office publishes the produced file to its own portal rather than mailing it, which was possible before and pointless before, because nobody wants a portal full of unreadable scans.

How it was put in

The information security officer who had broken the previous method was asked to try to break this one, before it was adopted. He could not, and said so in writing. That memo did more for adoption inside the office than the training did.

The three records staff were trained together in a morning. The exemption list in the template was built by the office's attorney over a week, which was the long pole and was work that needed doing regardless.

The portal publication was held back deliberately for a quarter, until the produced files were consistently good enough that the office was willing to have them public.

The result

Median turnaround went from eleven days to one. The office publishes that figure quarterly and it has held for four quarters.

Follow-up calls fell by roughly half, and the ones that remain are about scope rather than legibility. The clerk's own note is that the calls that stopped were the ones with the most risk in them, because they were the ones being answered by reading a record aloud without a second pair of eyes.

The office has not added staff. The three people doing records still work the counter.