Public records have always been a nightmare. Talk to any records officer with more than a few years on the job and you'll hear the same thing: the workload has been heavy for as long as anyone can remember, the statutes are unforgiving, and the public's tolerance for delay is low. None of that is new.
What's new is the slope. Several of the agencies we've spoken with in the last year have seen request volume double, year over year, for two years running — and the requests themselves have gotten more sophisticated and more complex right alongside the volume. Even allowing for noise in any one office's numbers, the pattern across jurisdictions is hard to miss.
Almost certainly, this is AI. Drafting a CPRA or FOIA letter that lands in the right office, with the right statutory citations and the right scope language, used to be skilled work. Now it's a paragraph in a chat window. A commercial-intelligence shop that would have filed ten requests a year — fishing for vendor rosters, contract pricing, procurement memos — can comfortably file hundreds. An advocacy organization can spin up parallel campaigns across a hundred jurisdictions in a weekend. The asymmetry — costless to send, expensive to fulfill — has tilted further than most public records programs were built to absorb.
This doesn't mean the requests are illegitimate. The right to ask is the point. But if the volume is structurally different, the response cannot stay structurally the same.
What's working
The teams staying ahead are not treating this as a temporary surge. They're rebuilding the operating environment around the new arithmetic. A few of the patterns we keep seeing:
1. Triage at intake
A request asking for a single, named record is a fundamentally different unit of work than a request for "all communications, in any format, mentioning [topic] from January 2019 to present." Treating both with the same workflow is the fastest way to bury your team.
A written triage rubric at intake is the simplest fix. The categories don't need to be sophisticated — they just need to exist and feed into different lanes downstream:
- Narrow vs. broad
- Clear vs. ambiguous
- Likely-responsive systems vs. an enterprise search
- Routine vs. politically sensitive
2. Codify your exemptions, in writing, once
Most agencies have their exemption knowledge in someone's head. The same call gets made the same way for the hundredth time, and the reasoning is not written down anywhere. When that person leaves — or simply takes a vacation — the institutional knowledge goes with them.
A written playbook is not bureaucratic overhead. It is the artifact you cite when a requester challenges a redaction, the training material for the next hire, and — increasingly — the input any modern records tool needs to be useful. Statutes, controlling case law, AG opinions, and your office's own internal guidance, in one place, referenced by every reviewer.
3. Map your responsive systems before you need to
When a request lands, where do you actually look?
- Outlook and other email systems
- SharePoint, Google Drive, and shared file stores
- Body-cam and dispatch archives
- Agenda and legislative systems
- Legacy network shares no one has touched in three years
- Texts on personal devices, where applicable
Most teams rebuild this map mentally for every request. Walk it once, write it down, and turn it into a default checklist. The savings compound across every collection going forward — and the map itself becomes the basis for every defensibility argument you'll later need to make about scope.
The teams staying ahead are not treating this as a temporary surge. They're treating it as a permanent shift in the operating environment.
4. Clarify scope before you produce
A thirty-second conversation often shrinks "give me everything from 2019 to now" into a request your team can actually fulfill on a reasonable timeline. Statute permits this; it's the part that's rarely systematized. Build a default response that asks two or three clarifying questions before kicking off discovery.
Requesters are usually willing. They want what they want, not the burden of receiving 40,000 emails they'll never read.
5. Invest in redaction that holds up to challenge
Redaction is where most reviewer hours go, and it's the one part of the workflow where the technology has genuinely changed in the last two years. The bar isn't whether a tool can blur a face or mask an SSN. The bar is whether the resulting packet — including the rationale, the exemption code, and the audit trail — would survive a challenge from a sophisticated requester or a court.
If you can't trace every redaction back to a reviewer, a timestamp, and a statute, the time saved on the front end tends to get repaid with interest on the back end. The investment worth making is in the audit trail, not just the speed.
6. Close the loop on overrides
Every time a reviewer overrides a draft redaction, that's signal. Every time a requester successfully challenges an exemption call, that's signal. Most offices have no systematic way to capture either. The ones that do see their accuracy curve up over quarters, not years.
The office that captures and acts on its own corrections is the office whose playbook gets sharper while everyone else's stays the same.
Where Mesa fits
Mesa for Public Records is built for this operating environment. The agent reads incoming requests, queries your responsive systems in parallel, applies your office's playbook across documents, email, audio, and video, and hands a triaged review packet back to your team — with a defensible audit trail behind every decision.
The point isn't to remove your records team from the loop. It's to put their judgment where the public actually needs it — interpreting an exemption, calling a borderline redaction, deciding what to release — and let the mechanical work happen mechanically. Agencies running Mesa are clearing in a calendar quarter what would otherwise have stretched into a multi-year project.
If your queue feels structurally different than it did two years ago, you're not imagining it. The arithmetic has changed, and the response can change with it.