DMN reporters Dave Levinthal and Reese Dunklin are working on stories about the Ray Hunt deal downtown and housing development, respectively. As such, they’ve requested a bunch of City Hall e-mails. They didn’t get the e-mails, so the paper sued. City attorney Tom Perkins has pretty much said finding all those e-mails is really hard. He added this:
Mr. Perkins wrote back, saying that retrieving the e-mails was time-consuming and labor-intensive. It required employees to obtain the e-mails from storage and inspect numerous messages while continuing their daily tasks maintaining the computer servers that run the 311 and 911 systems, he said.
Nice touch. Throw in a 911 reference whenever possible for a dose of perspective. “You want e-mails, but Mr. Johnson wants his knife wound attended to.”