Correction to earlier article on FOI Costs at Council
This paper was contacted by a Council spokesperson over issues they had with an article written on the FOI costs at Council. They raised three matters.
The first matter was that our article misquoted the Acting Director. This paper advises that the article written did not accurately reflect the Acting Director’s comments and wishes to advise the following retraction.
The quote “the budget for addressing FOI requests by ratepayers had now reached a staggering $190,000 per annum” was a comment in a different newspaper and was not a quote from the Acting Director. This paper apologies for the error.
The article goes on to quote the Acting Director as saying the following:
An approximate full-year budget for managing the current volume of FOI requests and informal information requests is $190,000, and this includes internal staff wages along with legal consultation fees. Formal FOI requests have more than doubled during this financial year compared to last.”
These quotes were correctly reported.
The third matter was around the final sentence in the article and a possible inference in that sentence that the Acting Director or Council might have been claiming the whole of the 63 hours to be spent on FOI work.
“Given that Ms Costello states that FOI requests come at a rate of one per fortnight it seems a stretch to claim that the whole of the 63 hours is for the FOI component of the information requests”.
This paper wishes to make a clarification that it was not saying that the Acting Director or Council were making that claim. A full reading of the article would have understood that Council made the comment that the 63 hours included other information requests as well so could not possibly have been solely for the FOI components.
The second matter is being written up separately
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