St. Paul Data Requests Exceed 24,000 as City Weighs More Staffing

St. Paul Surges Past 24,000 Projected Data Requests as Volume Doubles Since 2020

The City of St. Paul is staring down a wave of public information inquiries, with projections indicating the municipality will field roughly 24,400 data requests by the close of 2026.

That volume represents a climb from the 668 requests logged back in 2017, and roughly doubles the tracking data from 2020. City Attorney Irene Kao presented the figures during a committee meeting while outlining the proposed 2027 budget, noting that the city averaged 9.5 months of heavy influx before arriving at the current trajectory.

Behind the numbers sits a grinding administrative workload. While the city relies on GovQA records management software to receive and track submissions, a recent review by Wilder Research emphasizes that software is merely a tool. Executive Director Heather Britt told the city council that the bulk of the heavy lifting falls on human staff.

Once data is located across departments—ranging from police incident logs to records housed within the Department of Safety and Inspections, Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity, and the mayor’s office—staff must manually review and redact legally sensitive material line by line. Compliance is frequently described in internal reviews as a gray area rather than a black-and-white rule, carrying tangible personal risk for the workers handling the disclosures.

The Human and Technological Bottleneck

To keep pace with the mounting paperwork, the city is seeking to add two staff members at a cost of $226,406. The city already maintains 14 department designees tasked with reviewing data requests and brought on a dedicated data practices supervisor in August.

Yet city leadership questions whether simply adding headcount is a viable long-term solution.

“Given this explosion in the number of data requests, what is our long-term strategy to address them? Because it does not seem responsible or sustainable to keep up by hiring additional staff,” said Council President Rebecca Noecker.

Kao responded that while technological upgrades are part of the equation, legal review will always demand human capacity. Adding to the friction, the nature of the submissions has shifted. Wilder Research found that residents are not only engaging more frequently with municipal services, but they are also leveraging artificial intelligence to formulate broader, multi-department inquiries that pull records from wide ranges of municipal operations.

Litigation, Settlements, and Public Scrutiny

The surging volume and strict compliance standards have not happened in a vacuum. St. Paul’s data practices have drawn intense legal and public scrutiny, highlighted by two lawsuits filed by Save Our Street, a coalition objecting to a proposed Summit Avenue bikeway and regional trail. Those legal actions have challenged the structure of the city’s online information request portal and broader data handling practices.

The exterior of a beige government building — Photo: twincities.com

The city council will consider a proposed $160,000 legal settlement to resolve one of those disputes without admitting fault, while simultaneously petitioning the Minnesota Supreme Court to reconsider damages in the second case.

Meanwhile, the public portal itself receives mixed reviews from users. While an overwhelming 85% of surveyed users find logging into the portal easy, nearly half want clearer status updates on pending requests, and a third desire explicit instructions on what to include when filing. On the internal side, municipal employees report that understanding precisely what is needed to fulfill a complex request remains the hardest hurdle, with 62% calling for clearer workflow guidance and updated staff training.