Legal: NextRequest for FOIA Requests

THE CHALLENGE

Did you know that the City of Bloomington receives around 300 non-police related public records requests each year? The Indiana Access to Public Records Act (IAPRA) is a series of laws that allows  members of the public to view a public agency’s public records. 

Previously, the City’s Public Records Request (PRR) process was cumbersome, inefficient and included some duplication of effort.  Almost all PRRs were made, processed, and completed by email.  As a result, records responsive to a PRR were visible only to the requester and not maintained in a form that was searchable by other members of the public seeking the same records.    

To ensure PRRs were completed in a reasonable time, they were manually tracked through the process.  This involved regular communication with staff to nudge the request along.   

“On our website we had a form that a requester could fill out, but it wasn’t fillable on the website, so that was a little challenging for people […] You had to download the form and be able to modify it in adobe pro and if they didn’t have that it had to be handwritten and scanned back into the system or mailed back to us.” - Heather Lacy, via the IDS

THE IDEA

The Mayor’s transparency initiative  combined with an ambition to increase efficiency in internal processes drove the City’s Corporate Counsel, Beth Cate, to ask Director of Innovation, Devta Kidd, and Assistant City Attorney, Heather Lacy, to collaborate on a better process. 

It was clear from the beginning that a process optimization effort to incrementally improve information hand-offs was insufficient to address the City’s needs, the entire system needed to be reimagined.  Fortunately this need  wasn’t overly complex, and there were a number of software platforms on the market designed specifically for this purpose, so the decision to buy rather than build was made.

Four Public Records Management systems were evaluated and the City chose NextRequest due to its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) conformance, public self-service interface, internal tracking feature, and easy centralized redaction feature.  

Now PRRs are processed through an online public portal,,  where the requester can check the status of a request , documents can be uploaded, redacted, and released, and past requests can be searched.Transparency of the process? CHECK!

NextRequest  centralizes and organizes all communication relating to a request, and automatically generates notifications to involve users about next steps and upcoming deadlines. So, no more manual tracking!  Efficiency? CHECK!

As an added bonus, NextRequest has  the functionality to not only redact sensitive information within the platform, but also to do so in batch (for example: redact anything that is in the format of a social security number) eliminating the need for separate software.

THE COST

The City’s annual contract with NextRequest costs $6,990. 

THE BENEFITS

Since the launch of the new system in April, the benefits have been substantial. Requests are made, processed, and completed in a centralized system.  Residents can now not only make PRRs and check on the status of their request, they can also look at what information is of interest to other residents and view that instead of submitting a duplicate request. 

Metadata

Department(s): Legal Department, Office of Innovation

Department Point(s) of Contact: Heather Lacy heather.lacy@bloomington.in.gov, ITS, Greg Overtoom greg.overtoom@bloomington.in.gov, Devta Kidd

Partner(s): 

Partner Point(s) of Contact: 

Type of Innovation: Process Improvement 

Date Implemented: 2023