Subject:Title
Board Direction regarding Public Records Policy/Procedure, Dist. 2
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Fiscal Impact:
Reduced costs to County (see summary explanation and background) and increased preservation of taxpayer dollars
Dept/Office:
District 2
Requested Action:Recommendation
Seek Board direction on potential changes to AO-47 and BCC-22
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Summary Explanation and Background:
BCC-22 provides the County Commission's policy on the County's record management system. AO-47 outlines the County staff procedures with regard to processing public record requests. Revisions to both BCC-22 and AO-47 were placed on the County Commission Agenda by the County Attorney's Office for the May 21, 2019 meeting and again on the July 23, 2019 meeting as part of the routine sunset review process. Prior to both meetings, the items were removed from the agenda for consideration of additional changes.
Over the past several years, there has been a significant increase in the number of public record requests being processed by Brevard County staff as illustrated in the chart below.
YEAR
REQUESTS
2016
845
2017
1057
2018
1147
2019 (to date)
1373
This change represents approximately a 62% increase in requests from 2016 to 2019 (to the date this document was initially drafted). Importantly, these numbers only reflect those requests that are entered into the tracking system and do not represent all requests made to County staff. Many requests are fulfilled by county staff without use of the tracking system. This trend of increasing requests is only likely to continue and, as the number of requests increase, the staff time necessary to respond in a timely and efficient manner increases as well.
The current system set up by the County to respond to public records requests requires each department to designate a records custodian, who, in addition to his/her regular job duties, is required to respond to public record requests for documents maintained in his/her department. If the records r...
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