More Washington Ave emails

I am interested in learning about what City Council Members at-large do and what kind of influence they have. None want to touch any issue specific to district council members’ territory, due to the tradition of “councilmanic prerogative”. Would that change if citizens actually expected them to do their jobs on behalf of the entire city? Are Philadelphians so disillusioned with at-large members they don’t even voice their concerns to them on city-wide issues like the Washington Ave mess?

I submitted a Right-to-Know Law request to City Council in October to see what kind of constituent correspondence some at-large council members received regarding Washington Ave. The City provided very few records, arguing that they weren’t able to electronically search for records (debatable) and that because several of the at-large members resigned to run for mayor they no longer could find their records (wtf?). They produced a handful of emails from the offices of the few remaining at-large members.

Here’s what they produced:

city's production 12/23/22 by megankshannon on Scribd

There were a bunch of problems with the way they performed their search, so here are the OOR submissions for any RTKL nerds who are interested:

City Response - Shannon v. City of Philadelphia City Council OOR Dkt. AP 2022-2620 by megankshannon on Scribd