By Elizabeth McCall, City Desk ABQ
While a local transparency expert applauds Albuquerque’s City Clerk’s Office’s initiatives to reduce its backlog of public records requests — which the office receives thousands of each month — she says “there shouldn’t be any backlog at all.”
The City Clerk’s Office received 14,000 public records requests under the Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA) last year and with the requests significantly increasing, the office released its IPRA Backlog Reduction Plan Report.
According to the report, the office plans to further reduce its backlog of records requests by hiring more staff, conducting large requester outreach, improving its processes and digitizing records. In July 2024, the office had around 1,500 requests that were older than thirty days and as of December 2024, had a backlog totaling 1,128.
Christine Barber, the executive director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, said she doesn’t see the latest number as much of a decrease.
“They’re required by law to be responding to requests within 15 days,” Barber said. “I understand that they’re overworked, but that just means the city has to put more money towards targeting more staff…I’m glad they’re addressing it. I’m glad they have numbers for it, but this isn’t that much of an improvement. They need to have zero. That’s the only acceptable number.”
The number of requests the city receives annually tripled since 2017 and has increased by 18% from 2023 to 2024. The report states that despite the increase in requests, it has “managed to keep pace with the increased demand and closes more and more requests each year.”
The office has added more staff which has made a “significant impact on the backlog.” The office’s staff training used to take months for employees to complete but now takes a number of weeks. The office now has between 25 and 30 employees processing IPRA requests and the backlog has “been steadily decreasing since the new contract staff completed their training and began to process requests.”
The office has also been working on digitizing more than a million public records since 2023 and according to the report, it has digitized more than 22,000 Albuquerque Police Department “internal affairs documents.” The digitization process is ongoing but “will greatly increase the speed with which we are able to make these records accessible.”
Improving engagement with “large requesters” is another effort to reduce the backlog. These “large requesters” are banks, insurance companies, lawyers and consultants that account for a big portion of requests. Within that group, some of the requesters “submit as many as 500 requests or more in a given year,” and prioritizing engagement with them can help employees’ workload.
According to the report, the office will set up meetings with the requesters to help clarify and narrow their requests. It included an example where a “large requester reduced the number of records they were seeking in each of their requests which has had a significant impact on our workload and allowed us to redirect resources to other requests.”
Barber said making progress is admirable, but that fulfilling records requests is part of government work.
“They just need to fix the problem there and I applaud them for trying to make some progress…but that’s the job,” Barber said.
The report comes just as state lawmakers are considering a bill to increase fees for some public records requests.
The City Council is expected to hear a presentation on the report during its March 3 meeting.
Editor’s note: City Desk ABQ Editor Andy Lyman is a board member of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government.