Technology

This sounds sideways, as FOIA processing is a part of city services, and state services, and federal services.

Treating it otherwise has always seemed to invite abuse.

We also have a rule regarding conversion of electronic data from internal proprietary format to something the requestor can read that allows us to refuse if responding to the request would cause an undue disruption to city services.

How is that a legal workaround against FOIA? Literally every response to FOIA causes a 'disruption' to city services in that context. This sounds like a strategy from management that is incompetent or intentionally unethical trying to avoid processing FOIA requests. "Undue disruption" reads as a convenient scapegoat to hide things from the public, a public that the government is there to serve in the first place.

It would have taken about 6 months for a full-time employee, and our city only has 11 staffers, so we were able to tell them “no.”

~165 hours for ever 10k documents to review at 1 min avg per doc. 45k documents = 750 hours = 25 work weeks @ 30hrs.
That's $11,250 @ $15/hr wages. Call it $16,000 for FTE total costs as a govt employer. You can engage 10 local contracted temp workers to process the data in a under 3 weeks.

Once you have done the review, the dataset to that point has been compiled and can be used for other such requests without additional expenditures towards recompiling data up to that date.

I'm sure budgets are carefully crafted to avoid including FOIA processing.