For city clerks and public records officers
Public records requests, from intake to release.
Mesa proposes the responsiveness calls and redactions on each request, your staff approve them, and the release goes out with its response letter and withholding log.
What Mesa does on a request.
Log the request and set the due date
Mesa suggests the due date from your statute, counting business days and your office’s holidays, and logs every extension with its reason.
Clarify scope with the requester
Mesa drafts an acknowledgment letter with questions that narrow a broad request, and finds records you’ve already published so you can point the requester to them.
Collect from mailboxes and shared drives
Bring in mailbox exports, documents, video, and audio from Microsoft 365 or Google Drive, and Mesa organizes the pile before anyone starts reading.
- Copies across custodians collapsed into one record
- Email grouped into threads, so each conversation is reviewed once
- Newsletters and automated notices set aside as bulk mail
0
items
Collected
48,213 items
Copies collapsed
31,540 items
Threaded
4,102 conversations
Bulk mail set aside
1,906 review units
0
items
Collecting
Review for responsiveness and redact
Mesa proposes which records are responsive and what to redact, citing an exemption from your playbook, and nothing takes effect until your staff accept it.
- Playbooks drafted from the law that governs your office
- Redactions across documents, email, video, and audio
- A history of every decision and who approved it
Send the release
Mesa assembles the release from the decisions your staff approved and keeps a snapshot of them, so you can always show what went out and why.
- The released records, with redactions applied
- A response letter in your office’s format
- A withholding log with the exemption and rationale for each entry
Case study · San Francisco Assessor-Recorder
62 person-years of records review, done in nine person-weeks.
California law requires county recorders to redact racially restrictive covenants. In San Francisco, Mesa searched 7.4 million pages and prepared each redaction, and staff approved every packet before it was rerecorded.
7.4M
pages reviewed
128K+
staff hours saved
9
staff on the project
7 in 10
packets approved with no edits
“This project would have taken years of manual work without Caldera. We are grateful to have such incredible partners.”
Joaquin Torres
Assessor-Recorder, City & County of San Francisco
This work runs in Mesa’s Public Records workspace.
Explore Public RecordsSee Mesa work a request.
We’ll walk a request from intake to release and talk through how it would fit your office.