The City of Nanaimo is seeing a flood of Freedom of Information requests.
Reporting to council, City Clerk, Sheila Gurrie says F-O-I requests were around the 109 mark five years ago and peaked in 2016 with 263 requests, but in the first quarter of this year alone, the City has had 168 requests for information…..
That compares to Kamloops where F-O-I requests totalled 119 last year while Kelowna dealt with 102 and Victoria, 118.
The requests will exceed those for the City of Vancouver where there were 536 requests for information in 2017 and Surrey, where there were 530.
Gurrie was asked why the Nanaimo requests are up…..
Gurrie says it is difficult to determine the amount of time that is spent on F-O-I requests, but she figures 15 to 20 hours of staff time per day is spent working on them in the Legislative Services Department alone.
The fees charged, which are legislated, do not cover the cost for the time of work required to process each request.
