THIS POST HAS BEEN SENT TO THE FULL CITY COUNCIL. IT HAS BEEN TIMED TO ARRIVE IN ADVANCE OF THE 3/30/2021 CITY COUNCIL MEETING WHEN WE EXPECT FOIA LAW TO BE DISCUSSED. BY SUBMITTING THIS TO THE FULL COUNCIL, THIS EMAIL BECOMES PART OF THE PUBLIC RECORD AND CAN BE BROUGHT UP AND DISCUSSED.
To the City Council of Framingham,
We can’t let The Patch have all the fun in proving how the city chooses how to respond to FOIA requests. We at FU have been testing the city as well.
While some might say we have been seeking a “gotcha” moment, our FOIA requests are done with a purpose in mind.
On 1/25/2021 FU filed a FOIA Request with city of Framingham. The response was due on 2/8/2021. This was listed as FOIA #2021-0195.
Note the last line in the FOIA request above. We told the city that we would be asking for the same info from the state and asked them not to lie and withhold info. As stated, we filed a FOIA through the state.
The two FOIA request are counter each other and are seeking identical documents.
With our FOIA requests, we were merely seeking the truth on went down between the City of Framingham and the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services, in the days leading up to their non-certification of tax bills. This non-certification led to the city not being to send out tax bills on time, so this was kind of a big deal.
On 2/8/2021, the city responded with a group of response documents. The documents we received due to practice of FOIA aggregation was received under 2021-0185. Below, find the subject lines of each of the emails returned.
The majority of the responsive documents that were returned were bulletins, newsletters, and announcements put out by the state’s Department of Local Services. There just a few emails included which were actual conversations between people. Some of the topics covered in the person to person emails was the Community Compact (311 system assistance), a notification to the mayor that a ‘Schedule A’ had not been filed, and a discussion of remote learning enrichment programs offered by the state.
Click to enlarge.
However, no documents having to do with the Water & Sewer Enterprise Fund, were returned. There were no withheld document claimed and no citing of exemptions in order to with hold documents.
Believing that the city was honest with their response to us, we assumed that discussion of the Water & Sewer Enterprise Fund issues were not done by e-mail and may have been done by phone or in-person meetings.
On February 18th, we were shocked by the state. That evening, fourteen batches of emails came in to us from the state.
The State went above and beyond for us, spending 19 hours of time on our project. We thanked them profusely.
The entirety of the emails provided by the state, excluding the bulletins and newsletters, can be read by CLICKING HERE. To download the 14 batches of files in a PDF Format CLICK HERE.
When we compared the emails provided by the state to the emails provided by the city, we found that the state provided 13 more threads of emails than the city did. Due to subtle differences in the city vs. state FOIA we could only consider the emails between Mary Ellen Kelly and the state for our comparison.
When we looked at each of the emails that were included by the state but omitted by the city. In each case, the omitted emails could be deemed as embarrassing for the city. Because we value your time, we won’t discuss the further and have images of the omitted emails below. The content of the emails not supplied by the city, speak for themselves, it was another attempted coverup via FOIA.
The city attempted to pretend that all emails on the topic of the Water & Sewer Enterprise fund…. just didn’t exist and tried to sell us on it.
This is proof that the city withholds documents from FOIA requests in a manner not consistent with FOIA law, and in a manner which is blatantly illegal and shows real corruption in the Spicer Administration.
