Marion County wants $10k to see District Attorney Paige Clarkson’s work schedule
A records request for Paige Clarkson's public daily calendar came back with a huge pricetag
If you were trying to learn about worker productivity, and I asked you how much you’d pay to see the daily work calendar of someone you employ, you’d saaaayyyy…..
Fuck off, right?
As long as you’re not probing into the personal life of your employee, you would expect to have access to work-related calendar entries. Especially if you’re trying to understand productivity & efficiency.
We recently submitted a records requests to the Marion County to see District Attorney Paige Clarkson’s daily work calendar for 2019 & 2020. After some back and forth with a very helpful** Assistant Legal Counsel with Marion County, the request was clarified to mean:
"…meetings and appointment on (Clarkson’s Groupwise) calendar."
Days later, I received a cost estimate for locating and producing that information.
Through correspondence with Marion County, it was made clear that Clarkson’s calendar was maintained in a digital communications platform called Groupwise. If set up properly, exporting the calendar entries for a specific user - regardless of time period - shouldn’t be an issue. Not only shouldn’t there be an issue, it seems like a very simple process.
When asked about alternative or cheaper methods to access the data in question, Marion County Assistant Counsel indicated their office’s IT team wasn’t able to come up with a way to access and report on Clarkson’s calendar without spending 120 hours locating the records, and an additional 8 reviewing them.
**not sarcasm. the person that’s been helping us with this records request has been great!
Folks, that’s five (5) full work days “locating records.” And another entire day to review.
Could there be some rational, logical, maybe even plausible explanation for this outlandish estimate? Maybe? But I don’t think so. And I haven’t gotten one, yet. And I think it’s very, very unlikely one exists.
So instead of battling a seemingly deliberately inflated estimate and associated cost, maybe Paige Clarkson could just publish her work calendar for 2019 & 2020. Hey, I would settle for the last 6 months. Just event titles, location & description (if available).
And, in the interest of full transparency, here’s the question I’m trying to address.
We’ve heard that Clarkson isn’t physically in the office very much, and allows a “toxic” culture to flourish, making it difficult to retain prosecutors.
Using the work calendar information described above, we’d like to see if it’s true or not - that Clarkson isn’t around very much and the effectiveness of our District Attorney office suffers as a result.
See? That’s not too difficult. And, if this speculation is erroneous - a look at Marion County District Attorney Paige Clarkson’s work calendar should debunk this speculation solidly.
Seems like a no-brainer to me. Instead of paying political consultants nearly $100k to launch ad campaigns that attack her own profession, maybe Clarkson could answer simple questions about her ability to do her job.