From: "John Beamish" 

I took the context as: we made a request, they acknowledged it and then
nothing happened; we followed up (with phone calls) and the phone calls
weren't even acknowledged.

When I worked (many years ago) in Government and we had to reply to
outsider's requests, we acknowledged the request and, if unable to fully
reply, had to send an "in progress" letter with a date.  If it
couldn't be done within that date, then the "in progress" stuff
was repeated.  IOW, it might take us forever to get round to doing it, but
we provided an indication that it was still being worked on.

As for meat inspectors ... it is a federal and provincial responsiblity.
The province of Ontario has 10 government employee meat inspectors with an
additional 125 working under contract.  (The numbers came out when there
was a scandal a couple of months ago where an abatoir was taking in dead
animals after hours, processing them and shipping the meat out before it
reopened the next morning.)

I did a quick look for Federal numbers but couldn't find any.




"Randall Parker"
 wrote in
message news:3fec8df6$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> John,
>
> You are missing context. How do agencies normally respond to FIA requests?
My
> impression (and I've read about costs for FIA responses in the past) is
that they
> routinely go over the 30 day limit because it is incredibly easy for large
numbers of
> filers to make requests which each require man-months or man-years to
respond to.
> That takes budget. Does Congress appropriate enough money to agencies to
do FIA
> request processing and everything else they charge agencies to do? Nah, of
course not.
>
> The UPI article doesn't prove intent to cover up cases of mad cow.
>
> BTW, a Canadian friend tells me Canada used to have something like 180
full time
> inspectors for its cattle industry but that was cut back to 15
part-timers. Is this
> true? Have any full-time positions been restored since your one mad cow
case? I'd
> expect there'd be pressure now to staff up. My guess is your government is
now
> testing at a faster rate in response to that case and the US government
will do
> likewise in response to its one case.
>
> John Beamish wrote:
>
> >
> > Finally, UPI threatened legal action in early December if the agency did
not
> > respond.
> >
> > In a Dec. 17 letter to UPI from USDA Freedom of Information Act Office
> > Andrea E. Fowler, the agency wrote: "Your request has been
forwarded to
the
> > (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) for processing and to
search
> > for the record responsive to your earlier request."
> >
>

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