I can tell you that I worked at a local government many many years ago and purposefully delaying or charging a lot for open records requests the entity did not want to complete is absolutely something that was discussed and employed internally. Almost certainly there is malicious intent here, you are giving them too much benefit of doubt.

"The work falls outside normal scope of the person's job."

Maybe in some cases, but not in this case with this agency (SFUSD).

The responses I've received so far from SFUSD (over several years) were each from someone whose whole job is/was dealing with public records requests.

One of the requests that was refused was for a Google Slides deck that was visible to all of SFUSD's ~10000 employees.

Having got out of traffic tickets, it may be deliberate. If they don't respond at all within 30 days you can argue due process violation, but by slow dripping they can drag it out and not hit that timer. The 30 day period is telling.

I would think that since it is a law to comply. It is required to fall within the scope of at least someone's responsibilities.

Like another commenter, I've also been on the other side, and there was open discussion about how to delay responses or leave incriminating information out of them.

I remember specific examples of figuring out spurious legal objections to raise that would immediately fall if challenged, but would take months to challenge. I also remember people using records retention policies as 1) an excuse to destroy records that were still held, and pretending like they had been destroyed in the past, and 2) actively changing them in order to destroy things that had been requested, but maybe the request had been withdrawn to be resubmitted. I, as the IT person, remember being asked to come up with technical reasons why something could not be done, or would be expensive to do.

Related: I remember my innocence as an eager little guy in one of his earliest professional jobs, installing a system that would make everybody's email easily searchable if a subpoena or a FOIA had to be responded to, and the sheer panic and chaos that ensued. The solution was to install a chat that instantly dumped history and was not searchable, and to have a lot more face to face meetings.

Hanlon's Razor is a corruption enabler that only resonates because people confuse it with Occam's Razor. Occam was a logician; Hanlon's Razor was some bullshit submitted to a jokebook, and nobody knows who "Hanlon" is supposed to refer to.

Okay, what about spoonfeeding the records? If they got access to part 1/N, why did that not entail full access to the data? Otherwise they wouldn’t even be able to chunk it in the first place, no?

As in, the email was misrouted?

Or simply it falls into no one’s job?

The latter is deliberate. The former, maybe.

No way. You turn over everything and counsel does the privilege review.

I spent decades in public service. When the administration was into transparency, average time to response was <4 weeks, some within hours. When I retired, we turned off the system that tracked the requests.

This is correct. I interned in the legal department for a large R1 university that was a state institution, and we got so many FOIA-style requests that we absolutely could not keep up.

You might think they're sandbagging you, but you aren't the center of the university. There are likely several pests who send hella requests for stupid stuff, cackling about how they're punishing bureaucrats for being bureaucrats. Plus all the legitimate requests that you don't even know about.

Like what are you requesting that is so voluminous, and why do you think you're so special that no one else is doing the same thing at the same time?

I’m with you and always the first to point out an alternative explanation

But having to do with this subject specifically, the pattern is so common and the behavior so blatant, the amount of looking out for each other is so absurd, that I’d reject any claim that gives them the benefit of the doubt that doesn’t come with convincing evidence

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