Dear Summit City,

This is a request for public records made under OPRA and the common law right of access. I am not required to fill out an official form. Please acknowledge receipt of this message.
Records requested:

Email logs containing the sender, recipient (including blind-copied), subject, and date for the following city employees/elected officials from January 1, 2023 to May 11, 2023:

Nora Radest
Rosemary Licatese
Ellen Dickson
Ralph Maritato
Christa Anderson
Andrew Ball
David Naidu
Margarine Fox
Greg Vartan

Yours faithfully,

concerned.nj.taxpayer

Dear Summit City,
We are still awaiting the requested records, as required by law. This OPRA request is a follow-on request to one which we requested email logs for messages between the named individuals and and a group of specific non-governmental individuals between 2019 and May 2023. We received a message stating that the City had compiled the email logs but they consisted of hundreds of thousands of lines of data and it was impossible to filter these data based only on the names of the non-governmental individuals. That seemed reasonable to us and since we did not know the requested information, we submitted the current request. This request is for all email log data for the listed City officials for a targeted period, i.e., the first four months of 2023. We have been waiting patiently for the requested email logs, but they have not been provided in a prompt manner, despite the fact that you email mentioned that they have already been harvested from your server. Please promptly supply the requested records.

Yours faithfully,

concerned.nj.taxpayer

Dear Rosemary,
Thank you for resending this letter. Your response was included in the thread for our previous OPRA request (OPRA-2023-00468) so we missed it. We did want to get some further clarification; in your May 10 letter relative to that request (OPRA-2023-00468), you responded: “A search of the e-mail logs of the City officials listed above from January 1, 2019 to present has generated several hundred thousand records”. In your May 23 letter, you state: “ A search of the e-mail logs of the City officials listed above from January 1, 2023 to May 11, 2023 has generated a total of 357,489 records.” It seems like the two statements are conveying essentially the same information, despite the large difference in time and number of email addresses between the two requests. The May 23 covers a period of approximately 4 full months and six total city email addresses after the three were removed based on the fact that they did not have city email addresses at that time. The May 10 letter covers a period of approximately 4 years and nine total city email addresses.
Based on some quick math using the 357,489 records given to us on May 23, each of the six city email addresses would have sent and received 13,650 emails per calendar month. We find that number to be highly improbable, especially considering that several of the emails belong to part-time elected officials. Furthermore, if one extrapolates this monthly email count to the original request for 4+ years of data, the total count approaches 7 million records and not the “several hundred thousand” that you cite in your May 10 letter. Can you please check the records referenced and your response for accuracy and get back to us?

Yours sincerely,

concerned.nj.taxpayer

Dear Licatese, Rosemary,
The logs with subject omitted are okay at this point.

Yours sincerely,

concerned.nj.taxpayer