Board of Aldermen 12-10-2019 Page 10
It took 5 months OK? And they have to be redacted, but when | received the e-mails, they are all jumbled,
so | don’t understand when you ask for e-mails through IT and you ask for a consecutive time frame, they
send them to you in all scrambled dates, no order to them. And the batches came out in six batches, ok, all
scrambled. And there were a lot of August time frames in there, | didn’t ask for August, | hadn’t even been
in Assessing in August, | started in Assessing in September.
Out of those 5 batches a lot of duplicates, so they are redacting the same e-mails over and over again, in
some cases four, four of the same e-mails batched out. The long and short when | compiled and put
through a program that the “1,000 emails” it was really 1,200, it was really 700, there were 500 too many in
there that were repeats or not in the timeframe.
President Wilshire
Ms. Ortolano, there is one minute left of public comment.
Ms. Ortolano So my concern is this: Legislation like Jan Schmidt's that charges me for the hour to obtain
data that | don’t want, that | didn’t ask for, the last batch, batch #6, that they sent me November 15" was
3,000 pages of August e-mails and data. | wrote to Celia Leonard and said, “I didn’t ask for these dates, |
didn’t even ask for anything in August, you just spent a month redacting all of this stuff that | didn’t even ask
for’. And | got a very curt response back, “We have satisfied your Right-to-Know Mrs. Ortolano”. OK, |
don’t want to pay for that. And | wish Jan would write some legislation that would maybe have cities
produce e-mails in sequential order that would help not only the citizen who is looking at the data but the
Legal Office that has to go through it and is paying for redacting.
President Wilshire
Our public comment period is over.
Ms. Ortolano Thank you.
President Wilshire
Thank you.
REMARKS BY THE MEMBERS OF THE BOARD OF ALDERMEN
Alderman Tencza
| just want to thank the crews for the DPW for their work over the past couple of weeks, the past
snowstorms they did a great job clearing the main streets, the side streets. And then also you know
coming in over the weekend to clear the trash because of the delay. | was down here on Main Street
Saturday one of the merchants mentioned to me, you know, it is a busy time of year, they’d really like to get
the snow cleared. And then | was out there again today and it was cleared. So | think they are doing a
great job hopefully we don’t have too many more snowstorms this winter, but if we do | think we can rest
assured that they will be ready for them. So thank you to them.
Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja
Yes | would like to echo Alderman Tencza’s words about the quality of work DPW did. | think it was just a
very tough situation for them trying to have our downtown clean so people could easily come in and out a
couple of weekends before Christmas and at the same time delaying trash pick-up and doing that on
Saturday and Sunday. | would just like to thank all of the residents who were patient with that. | know
people brought their trash barrels and then saw “Oh a 2 day delay” and they brought them back in. Thank
you to everyone for your understanding.
