Reimagining Public Records Access — the New South Bend APRA Request Form
The City of South Bend is making strides toward greater transparency, efficiency, and accessibility with its new APRA form experience!
An APRA (Access to Public Records Act) request is a state-given right that every resident has to request documents that are in the public record, those which are created by the government or are official acts of public officials and employees. This can mean a case report from the Police Department, inspection records from the Historic Preservation Commission, or payment histories from Water Works — among many other things.
In partnership with the Legal Department, our Digital Services team created a solution to help alleviate the administrative burden of City staff while at the same time ensure that residents have a better understanding of and ability to access public records.
TLDR
Problem: City residents often didn’t know what kinds of public records were available to them, and APRA requests were coming through the door in various, often outdated, forms. This led to lots of process waste for the Legal department.
Solution: A single, digital APRA request form that clearly shows which public records are available to request, gathers all relevant information, populates into a centralized request repository, and auto-populates a standardized PDF record of the request.
Tools used: Interviews, Jotform, SharePoint, Power Automate
Wrangling unruly APRA request forms
There was no clarity about what kinds of requests could be made in the first place, which led to many unqualified requests being sent to City departments. Each department had their own version of an APRA request form, and often residents or their lawyers would fill them out and end up filling out outdated versions of the forms. Some of these forms were not even submittable online — some required residents to come in person, take the forms home, fill them out, bring them back in along with other materials such as their IDs. Many of these were hand-written and incomplete.
Then, once the initial form was submitted, often there would be more forms needed through third parties, like HIPAA records. The Legal team would then have to contact the requestee or third party to gather and verify information, which meant a lot of playing phone tag, consuming a lot of time and energy.
Furthermore, this system created unnecessary confusion and burden on residents! An average resident might not have a lot of experience requesting records or interacting with the City government, leading to requests that were unable to be fulfilled because they were not completed correctly.
With all of this, the need for a solution that combined, condensed, and streamlined the APRA request process became more apparent. This not only meant a new form, but also a holistic approach to the entire form experience, from the submission to storage to transmission. The solution would have to benefit stakeholders across the system, from residents to City employees. The Legal team was ready to transform their process to help alleviate their administrative burden.
Bringing order to form chaos
The Digital Services team’s first job was to understand the needs of all ten City departments, to ensure the digital form communicated effectively to the user.
“We spent a lot of time going through all the forms and condensing the information into the basic, most common requests that departments would get,” says Andrea Sandusky, Digital Services’ Solution Designer. “Before, residents didn’t have the ability to see the kinds of requests that were available, and they literally didn’t know what they didn’t know. We had departments tell us the most common requests, which allowed us to point residents toward the kind of information that they wanted, and that was available to them.”
A lot of this was setting expectations for residents. Some information that residents might want might literally not exist, but if that’s not communicated to them, they might think something is amiss.
For example, a common request is traffic light footage, usually gathered for insurance purposes. The City of South Bend, however, has thermal cameras on stoplights, which gather heat data to trigger the lights and aren’t very useful for those purposes. The Digital Services team made sure to include a disclaimer so that residents didn’t waste time trying to find something that didn’t exist.
The new form also includes a space for residents to include the additional documentation they need for the request, such as a HIPAA record, reducing the runaround and phone tag for both residents and City employees.
Finally, a key priority in this new form was to make it as accessible as possible. Making it entirely accessible online was a major part of this — now anyone can submit without having to physically go to a City department in-person.
Change management for an innovative form
Because the new form experience affects stakeholders all the way through the City organization, Digital Services had to make sure that the transition into this new system went as smoothly as possible.
Now, when an APRA request form is submitted, it’s automatically sent to a SharePoint list that is managed by the Legal Department, who reviews the data and sends it to the relevant department to retrieve the record(s). The solution also generates the formal record of the request into a PDF template, which gets sent via email to both the requestee and our Legal Department.
“Legal had their own electronic record process, so I made sure that the solution went well with their current system to make it as frictionless as possible,” says Andrea.
When it came time for the new APRA request form to go live, there was a “drop dead” date that was widely communicated to the City departments. This gave them enough time to phase out the old, outdated, paper form system and acclimate to the new one.
“The fact that the new system has cut out the initial logging, request numbering, and acknowledgment emails alone has made the entire process much more efficient, with fewer chances of anything slipping through the cracks. It definitely feels like most of our requestors have adapted quickly to the new process,” says Marissa Frattini, legal administrative assistant. “I’m looking forward to the months ahead and seeing how this will continue to help with the flow of requests.”
Since the new system went live in 2024, the feedback from City employees has been overwhelmingly positive and employees are excited to have a streamlined system. Now, the City of South Bend is eager to share these findings with other local governments interested in reconfiguring their APRA request process.
“If I was to offer any advice, I would say that having a list of most requested records as well as the pain points of the process is crucial,” says Andrea. “It’s also important to get resident input and really listen to what they’re trying to access when they fill out these forms, because the most important thing is making this information as accessible as possible for all.”
