A Freedom of Information request gone awry has lead to some changes with how information is handled at town hall.
The Office of the Information & Privacy Commissioner got involved after a resident requested some information from the town under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act but the resident was unable to get a complete set of records.
Mayor Bob Day explained the story in short.
“There was a resident who had made a request for information. We’d just finished updating our server — it wasn’t that long ago — to a much newer server, so transferring data from one to another, the different process are outdated,” he explained. “Long story short, everything was supplied to the resident except for the emails between the councillors. Not that we’re casting any shadows on what took place in those emails but that was the one piece of data that couldn’t be grabbed by the system.”
That wasn’t good enough for the resident, who pushed for the complete records.
“We’ve since purchased the updated software so that we could extract that data and that has been done and that has been supplied to the resident as per their request,” Day said.
sarah.simpson@cowichanvalleycitizen.comLike us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
