The City of St. Paul is facing a staggering surge in public data requests, leading city officials to propose hiring more staff to prevent the system from collapsing under its own weight. City Attorney Irene Kao reported that the city is on track to hit 24,400 requests in 2026, a volume she described as “incredibly high.”
A decade of exponential growth
In 2017, St. Paul processed just 668 total data requests. By 2024, that number exploded to 22,678. While requests dipped slightly to 21,915 in 2025, the trajectory remains steep. The volume of requests has effectively doubled since 2020.
| Year | Total Data Requests |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 668 |
| 2024 | 22,678 |
| 2025 | 21,915 |
| 2026 (Projected) | 24,400 |
The vast majority of this workload is concentrated in one place. Roughly 95% of all annual requests are directed at the St. Paul Police Department, spanning everything from reports to statistics to video. However, other departments—including the Mayor’s office and the Department of Safety and Inspections—are also seeing a steady climb in demand.
AI tools create more complex resident requests
It isn’t just that there are more requests; the requests themselves have become more difficult. Heather Britt, Executive Director of Wilder Research, told the city council on October 14 that residents are increasingly using AI to formulate their submissions. This has resulted in “deep and wide” inquiries that span multiple departments and require complex synthesis of information.
The city uses GovQA software to track these requests, but software cannot make legal judgments. Much of the most grueling work happens after the data is found. Staff must manually review documents to redact legally sensitive information—a process described in the Wilder Research report as a bear of a chore.
Compliance is “highly interpretative,” according to the report, which quotes an unnamed interviewee as saying “‘it’s not black and white at all. It’s very gray.’ Staff carry real personal risk when releasing data.”
This “gray area” creates a psychological burden on city employees. 46% of staff surveyed said the hardest part of the process is simply understanding what is needed to complete a request, while 62% are asking for clearer workflow guidance.
Legal pressure and the cost of compliance
Two lawsuits filed by Save Our Street—a coalition opposing a proposed Summit Avenue bikeway—have specifically targeted the city’s data practices and the structure of its online portal. To resolve one of these cases without admitting fault, the city council is considering a $160,000 settlement, while simultaneously petitioning the Minnesota Supreme Court to reconsider damages in the second case.
To combat this, the County Attorney’s Office is seeking to add two staff members at a cost of $226,406. This would supplement the 14 department designees and a data practices supervisor hired in August.
But some officials aren’t convinced that throwing money at payroll is the answer. Council President Rebecca Noecker questioned the sustainability of this approach, asking what the long-term strategy is because hiring more people doesn’t seem like a responsible permanent solution. Kao countered that while technology is part of the investment, the legal review—the actual thinking and deciding—still requires human capacity.
The friction of transparency
On one hand, the city has made its public portal easier to use, with 85% of surveyed users finding the login process simple. On the other, the “information technology catacombs” of City Hall are not designed for the volume of the 2020s. One request took 1,400 calendar days to close.
