Miami wanted to charge millions for public records requested by fired police chief
Days after former Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo was fired in October, his lawyers submitted a lengthy public records request for emails, phone records and other internal City Hall communications. Months later, Miami’s public records office delivered a hefty price tag: $2.3 million
On Jan. 14, city administrators wrote an email to Acevedo’s attorneys explaining that producing the roughly 10 million emails that match their proposed search criteria could cost Acevedo’s team $2,387,820.11, and half would be needed as a deposit to begin the work of reviewing each email for any information that should be redacted under state law.
The seven-figure bill was one of several complaints about the city’s behavior listed in the 52-page federal lawsuit Acevedo filed Wednesday against several city officials. The ousted chief is accusing the Miami city manager and three commissioners of violating his First Amendment rights and retaliating against him for alleging corruption among commissioners. All of the city officials involved have denied Acevedo’s claims.
The Miami Herald confirmed the figure through its own public records request, which yielded documents that show the former police chief’s legal team asking for written communications from a wide range of people — commissioners, aides, administrators, cops — on a bevy of topics dating back up to three years in some cases, in addition to a slew of phone records.
The city’s staff boiled down the request into multiple sets of keywords for the city’s Information Technology staff to search across multiple servers. The searches applied to the police department’s servers alone yielded 10.8 million emails, according to the breakdown provided to Acevedo’s attorneys.
Staffers estimated that with someone reviewing three emails per minute, at a rate of $39.36 per hour for the employee doing the review, the review of the police department emails would cost about $2.3 million. Another search of the city administration’s servers at its Miami Riverside Center yielded about 56,000 emails, which would cost an estimated $12,000.
Read the public records correspondence — provided to the Herald on Thursday at no cost — and Acevedo’s lawsuit below.
This story was originally published January 20, 2022 at 4:44 PM.
