The Public's Right to Know: New Rochelle's FOIL Stonewall Part III

DUBLIN, IRELAND (August 18, 2026) — This is Part III in a multi-part series.

In Part II, I described what happened after I sought records involving Generations Church and the City of New Rochelle. The City said its search had identified more than 10,000 records, later nearly 11,000 "and counting." I asked how the search had been conducted — what repositories had been searched, what search terms had been used, what date ranges had been applied and what "and counting" meant — because without that information there was no practical way for me to know how to narrow the request intelligently.

The Generations Church request was not the first time a New Rochelle electronic-records search had produced a startlingly large number. It was part of a pattern I had encountered before: 20,000, 16,000, 11,000, 2,000. Those numbers sound dramatic. Standing alone, however, they tell a reader surprisingly little.

A large search result does not necessarily mean a records request is unreasonable, and it does not necessarily mean an agency is doing anything wrong. Electronic searches can capture duplicates, long reply chains, routine notices, acknowledgments, irrelevant uses of a search term and records that are technically responsive but have little relationship to what the requester is actually trying to learn. A narrowly framed request can still produce an unexpectedly large universe because the requester does not know how an agency stores its records or how a particular search term behaves inside its systems.

For nearly two decades, I have dealt with that problem in a fairly ordinary way: I talk to the records access officer.