The things we get requests on is how we spend money.”

Assistant City Administrator and Data Compliance Officer Kelly Murtaugh

Staring at the Jan. 24, 2024 ISD 200 School Board meeting, school board members began receiving reports on the number, size and scope of data requests received by the district in addition to the legal fees associated with completing them.
Based on these reports, provided at school board meetings by Human Resources Director Cathy Moen, a better picture of the number of data requests received by the district, and the costs imposed by them can been seen over the last year.
In 2024, Moen reported a total of 26 data requests received by the district with legal fees totaling $18,537. This figure doesn’t represent the entirety of the costs related to data requests, however, merely the legal fees. District staff, including Moen, work to compile and deduplicate data requests. Those hours of employee work are not represented in the $18,537 figure.
In addition, legal fees associated with data requests often have a lag time that can last months. For example, in the Jan. 6, 2025 school board meeting, Moen reported $8,946 of legal fees. “Those were November costs that are just now getting reported on,” said Moen. This late addition would bring legal fees for the district for 2024 over $27,000.
Existing mechanisms for districts to claw back some of the time and money spent to compile data requests exist, but in the case of ISD 200, have largely been ineffective. Individuals requesting data from the district can often view the data for free. If a requester would like copies of the requested data, only then do they incur costs.
If a requester would like a copy of data for a request with fewer than 100 pages, the cost is $0.25 per one-sided page or $0.50 for two-sided pages. If the request is longer than 100 pages, the request is “charged based upon the actual cost of searching for and retrieving the data and making the copies or electronically sending the data, unless the cost is specifically set by statute or rule,” according to district 200 policy 722: Public Data Requests.
While this ‘actual cost’ does include employee time, it still can be a serious loss of money for the district even if it is paid because the rate the district can charge is the “cost of lowest-level person who can do the work,” said Moen.
Despite this charging mechanism, a number of data requests received by the district come from anonymous sources and are abandoned after the anonymous requester is presented with the cost. In these cases, the district has no recourse in clawing back the expenses incurred from abandoned requests.
This exact scenario was detailed at the Nov. 20, 2024 school board meeting where two requests were completed and the requester was notified, only for the request to be “withdrawn once they found out the cost,” said Moen at the November meeting. Solely the employee costs of those two data requests was $6,072.22. That figure is not reflected in the $18,537 legal fees figure.
“We are talking many, many thousands of dollars’ worth of time and energy and services that have been provided for someone to abandon the request,” said School Board Chair Carrie Tate at the November school board meeting.
This broad ambiguity of the cost of data requests, reflected in the lagging legal fees and the unreported employee hours that go into compiling them, is notable for a district that has long struggled with the once-bureaucratic process and is facing budget cuts.
The school board spoke with Rep. Tom Dippel (R-Cottage Grove) on Feb. 26 about taking up the issue of data requests. One of the board’s legislative priorities, an issue the board presented at the Minnesota School Board Association (MSBA) delegate assembly, is to “Require data request submissions to require individual/organization identification and allow school districts to recover all costs.”
This issue was taken up by the MSBA for the 2025 session, and Dippel appeared receptive to taking up non-revenue requests. If passed, the barring of anonymous data requests along with a stronger mechanism for school districts to recover costs could obviate the deluge of data requests received by ISD 200, saving potentially thousands of dollars in both legal fees and staff time.

County Data Requests
Data requests have increased across institutions in recent years even beyond school districts. In 2023, Dakota County received nearly 1m000 more data requests than in 2022, 4,698 requests in 2023 up from 3,836 in 2022.
Dakota County has 45 data practices liaison employees. These employees range across departments, with some working mainly on data requests. “There are a few employees that spend a significant amount of their time responding to requests, many liaisons only respond to a few requests a year, depending upon what department they are in,” said Dakota County Communications Coordinator Mary Beth Schubert.
More than the increase in data requests at Dakota County, the increased complexity of data requests is what takes more time when responding to them, said Dakota County Data Practices Compliance Official Jerod Rauk.
“There is just more data created in the work we do every day,” said Rauk, citing the proliferation of emails and security footage that can be requested as compared to in decades past.
While at the county level the sheriff’s office consistently receives the most data requests, county divisions like physical development, social security and environmental review are other areas of high traffic for data requests.
Another area with a high number of data requests at the county level is elections.
“We didn’t get many this year, but in 2022, those numbers exploded,” said Rauk. Even before 2020, which saw the rise of election skepticism across the country, elections would see a rise in data requests.
When it comes to the costs of the thousands of data requests the county receives each year the “law is set up to not recoup the actual costs,” said Rauk.
It is common practice to waive fees for data requests of less than five pages and data request liaisons don’t track the hours spent on data requests.

City Data Requests
At the city level, Hastings hasn’t seen a particular rise in data requests during the three years Assistant City Administrator and Data Compliance Officer Kelly Murtaugh has been with the city of Hastings.
“The things we get requests on is how we spend money,” said Murtaugh. The city receives 40-50 data requests annually ranging from wage scales for staff positions to information about buildings from potential purchasers.
“Most data requests, if they take an hour, I’d be surprised,” said Murtaugh.
The city has a policy similar to ISD 200 for recouping costs with a per-page cost of $0.25 for requests for 100 or fewer pages and an actual-cost method for requests larger than 100 pages. That system isn’t often common, however, said Murtaugh, due to the dearth of data requests to the city and the usual ease in answering them. For these reasons, the city does not track the exact number of data requests it receives.
“The only tracking we would do is if it was a really, really labor-intensive request,” said Murtagh.