from Con
As illustration of your point I recall one particular FOI Demand Action which I believe went all the way in the administrative process and, because it was so broad, burdened a lot of employees to search carefully in order to comply with a demand to basically produce ‘any & all communication to, from or among [Name, X, Y & Z], including emails, notes, blogs, etc. for X Months’ - and compliance demands production of every scrap, so imagine each employees tedious and time-consuming efforts on just the email ‘trees’ alone - Employees who had to stop working at their actual job and labor on this matter, all paid for on the Taxpayer’s dime.
As far as I could tell, the only purported purpose of the FOI Demand was the implementation of Meeting Agendas that would be comprehensive, transparent and allow no unfair surprises. Seems Fair; the FOI Demand did not, nor did it seem suited to achieve that end.
I don’t know if the parties ever just sat down and talked; I don’t believe that direct request regarding Agenda changes was ever made; nor did I ever hear of ANY kind of offer of informal meeting; nor of any compromise; or Alternative Dispute Resolution; or efforts to narrow matters to keep costs down and ensure that the FOI Demand language limited itself to truly germane material. There was an atmosphere of a stubborn stand-off on both sides, but only one side initiated the matter and seemed to a lot of us to have had a stern and stubborn lesson to teach (at our expense).
I remember a lot of celebration that they had ‘won’, but I don’t know what they could have possibly thought they won or why the hell anyone would celebrate such an abject waste of severely limited Tax dollars and hours and hours of limited Employee’s time and efforts; I never found out if a single document produced related in any way to the resulting Agenda changes or how the actual proceedings furthered anyone’s interest in any way, except as an object lesson in sheer spite (followed by further irony when woodstocktruth.com published scathing comments complaining about the ‘waste of money that should be for our kids!’).
These were merely my impressions - I could be completely wrong, but I didn’t find unbiased information on the matter and, like many Town Citizens perhaps, was left simply wondering what was it all about and who were these people?