Big Story: Newport News Rebuilds Its Public Records System From the Ground Up
Key Takeaways
Newport News centralized its Freedom of Information Act process after annual public records requests exceeded 3,000.
The city built the new system around Granicus' Records Request Management platform, routing every request through a single intake and tracking process, regardless of how it arrived.
Traffic on the city's records portal rose 68% year over year after the archive feature launched, and requests grew 190% over five years.
Newport News, Virginia, spent years managing public records requests the way many mid-size cities do, with departments tracking intake through separate spreadsheets, inboxes, and informal logs. As requests climbed past 3,000 a year, driven in part by attorneys and by more complex records such as body camera footage, that patchwork approach began producing incomplete data and inconsistent response times across departments.
The Office of the City Attorney addressed the gap by hiring a dedicated FOIA coordinator and requiring that every request, regardless of intake method, go through a single platform. That decision replaced department-level tracking with one citywide protocol covering redaction, retention, processing costs, and staff training.
Newport News adopted Granicus' Records Request Management system, known as GovQA, to unify intake, tracking, and fulfillment. A central part of the approach involved publishing frequently requested records directly to a public archive. Staff can now direct requesters to self-service records instead of relocating, redacting, and re-uploading identical files, which is especially important when a single request involves hundreds of documents. Developers researching the same address no longer need to perform duplicate manual searches.
Traffic on the city's GovQA portal rose 68% year over year following the archive rollout, and the city recorded a 190% increase in total requests over five years. Newport News expanded its FOIA coordinator role to full time and added dedicated support within the police department, changes officials say were justified directly by the workload data the new platform made visible.
The city also built a cost recovery model into the system, using the platform's billing tools to calculate hourly rates and charges for different request types. Revenue from those fees now fully covers the cost of the platform.
Granicus' 2025 Public Records Complexity Benchmark Report found that request complexity has risen 72% since 2018, request volume has grown 161%, and file sizes have expanded 438%, with video files alone up 173%. A separate industry survey found that 63% of public records professionals cite redundant requests as a top concern, and 60% cite staffing shortages, underscoring why systems capable of absorbing increased volume without proportional staff growth have become a priority for local governments.
The results earned Newport News national recognition, including designation as an All America City for civic engagement and a What Works Cities Silver Certification from Bloomberg Philanthropies for its use of data to improve resident services. City officials describe the effort as an ongoing process with staff continuing to expand the platform's use for load balancing, billing, and retention management.
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Insight of the Week:
New data from the MissionSquare Research Institute shows state and local IT positions have gotten steadily easier to fill, with the share of agencies reporting hard-to-fill IT roles dropping from 69% in 2022 to 64% in 2023, 45% in 2024, 40% in 2025, and 35% this year. Despite the improvement, a companion survey found many computer science undergraduates remain unaware that public-sector technology careers exist or assume the work is unstable. The findings suggest better marketing and flexible work options, not just pay, may be the next lever for closing the remaining gap.
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