San Francisco saved 128,000 staff hours

Public records requests, from intake to release.

Mesa collects, reviews, and redacts the records for each request under your jurisdiction’s law, and prepares the release for your staff to approve.

See the workflow
A public records request to the City of Westover for emails and files about the Lakebridge Ave resurfacing, January to March 2026, moves from arrival to release. Intake logs it as PRR-2026-0418, received Monday, April 6, and counts ten business days to a due date of Monday, April 20. Collection pulls 1,847 items from three mailboxes, SharePoint, and a shared drive; removing duplicates leaves 903, and grouping threads leaves 212 review units. A reviewer approves Mesa’s proposed redactions and one withholding. The release, a production of 204 records with a response letter and an 18-entry withholding log, is ready to send on April 14, six business days in.

Public records have become the DDoS attack on government. AI is making them costless to send and ten times harder to fulfill. Your team is drowning in the deluge — Mesa pulls them out.

How Mesa works

From request to release, end to end.

Every public records request — FOIA, CPRA, or your state’s analogue — runs through the same six steps. Mesa’s agents carry each one, on the systems your team already uses.

Microsoft PurviewSharePointNextRequest
Intake
NextRequestNextRequest

PRR-2026-0241

Westover Tribune

Lakebridge Ave resurfacing · Q1 2026

Discover
PurviewPurview4,184 in scope
SharePointSharePoint312 in scope
NextRequestNextRequest1 thread
Triage
Candidates4,496
After dedup3,820
Threads collapsed2,940
Responsive142
Redact
PDFLakebridge_PreBid_Memo.pdf5
DOCXValley_Paving_Review.docx6
MP4Council_2026-02-17.mp41:48
Review
MR

M. Reyes

Senior Records Analyst

Ready · Due Apr 15
Release
Determination sent · Apr 12

Packet of 142 records published to NextRequest.

Audit log entry written

Redaction across documents, email, audio, and video.

  • One playbook for every file type

    The same rules apply everywhere, with object tracking on video and time ranges on audio.

  • Ask in plain language

    Ask it to redact trade secrets or find privileged material, and it cites the exemption it applied.

  • A record of every decision

    Each redaction records who approved it, when, and under which exemption.

Your exemptions, applied the same way every time.

A playbook rule for the deliberative process exemption, Cal. Gov. Code section 7927.705, citing Times Mirror Co. v. Superior Court, 53 Cal. 3d 1325 (1991), is applied to a City of Westover pre-bid memo on Lakebridge Ave. Mesa tests the memo against four criteria: it is pre-decisional, deliberative, internal, and the public interest in withholding outweighs disclosure while bidding is open. The engineer’s cost estimate is a statement of fact, so it stays public. The staff recommendation becomes a proposed redaction citing the rule, awaiting reviewer approval.

  • The law, not a pattern list

    Playbooks hold your statutes, case law, and guidance, and the agent reasons from them.

  • Reasons through the gray areas

    For balancing tests, it weighs the interests, explains its reasoning, and cites the controlling case.

  • Update once

    Change a rule and every reviewer works from the new version.

Gather the responsive records.

  • Searches where the records are

    Mesa searches mailboxes, shared drives, and agenda systems for what the request asks for.

  • Ready for review

    Duplicates collapse, email threads group, and bulk mail is set aside before anyone reviews.

  • A logged search

    Each query and system searched is recorded, so you can show how you scoped the request.

Release with the log already written.

Approved review decisions assemble into a release: a production of 38 records with redactions applied to documents, email, video, and audio; a response letter citing those counts; and a withholding log listing the exemption and rationale for each entry.

  • The production

    Approved redactions are applied to the released copies, and the set is saved as a snapshot.

  • The response letter

    Mesa drafts the letter with counts of what was released, redacted, and withheld.

  • The withholding log

    Every withheld record and redaction is listed with its exemption and reason.

Case study · San Francisco Assessor-Recorder

San Francisco reviewed 7.4 million pages in nine months.

The Assessor-Recorder’s office used Mesa to find and redact racially restrictive covenants in every recorded property document, as California’s AB 1466 requires.

62 → 9

person-years to person-weeks

128K+

staff hours saved

9 mo

from start to finish

8 in 10

packets approved with no edits

Security and governance.

How we protect your data

Audit trail

Every redaction, release, and override is logged and can be exported.

Never used to train AI

Your data is never used to train AI models, ours or anyone else’s.

SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA

Independently audited under SOC 2 Type II, with the safeguards the HIPAA Security Rule requires.

Least-privilege access

Sign in through your identity provider, with permissions by user or group.

Connectors

Connects to the systems your records team uses.

Microsoft 365
SharePoint
Google Drive
Laserfiche
Granicus

If your stack isn’t here yet, .

See Mesa on a request like yours.

We’ll walk your team through a request from intake to release.

Read the SF case study