Responses to Requests

Radford's Responsibilities in Responding to Requests for Records:

Radford must respond to your request within five working fays of receiving it. "Day One" is considered the day after your request is received.  The five-day period does not include weekends or holidays. If it is not possible to respond to your request withing five working days, you will be promptly notified and Radford will have an additional seven working days to complete the request. 

The reason behind your request for public records is irrelevant and you do not have to state why you want the records before we respond to your request.  FOIA does allow Radford to ask you to provide your legal name and address. 

Responses to Requests

FOIA requires that Radford make one of the following responses to your request in writing within the five day time period:

• We provide you with the records you have requested in their entirety.
• We withhold all of the records that you have requested, because all of the records are subject to a specific statutory exemption(s). The response must identify the volume and subject matter of the records being withheld, and state the specific section of the Code of Virginia that allows us to withhold the records.
• We provide some of the records that you have requested, but withhold other records. We cannot withhold an entire record if only a portion of it is subject to an exemption. In that instance, we may redact the portion of the record that may be withheld and must provide you with the remainder of the record. We must provide a response stating the specific section of the Code of Virginia that allows portions of the requested records to be withheld.
• We inform you that the requested records cannot be found or do not exist (i.e., we do not have the records that you requested). However, if we know that another public body has the records, we must include contact information for the other public body in our response to you.
• If it is practically impossible for Radford to respond to your request within the five day period, we must state this and explain the conditions that make the response impossible. This will allow us seven additional working days to respond to your request, giving us a total of 12 working days to respond to your request.
• If you make a request for a large number of records and we feel that we cannot provide the records to you within 12 working days without disrupting our other organizational responsibilities, Radford may petition the court for additional time to respond to your request. However, FOIA requires that we make a reasonable effort to reach an agreement with you concerning the production for the records before we go to court to ask for more time.