The City of New Orleans publishes a dataset it describes as "a feed of all public records requests that have been published", refreshed nightly from the request portal the City Attorney’s Office runs. The copy stamped 16 August carries 10,340 rows. Seventy-six of them have no publication date at all.
Those rows share a signature. Along with the missing publication date, each has no closure reason recorded and a last-update timestamp that has not moved since the week the request was filed. Four are still carrying the portal’s "Due soon" status more than 1,340 days after the due date printed beside it. They cluster heavily in late 2022 — 16 rows filed in October, 23 in November, 10 in December — with the rest scattered from 2017 to 2024.
What this is not is a backlog. The file’s own closure field marks the checkable examples closed, and Louisiana’s public records law suspends a custodian’s duty to produce where a requester has not paid the applicable copying costs, which is the state recorded against the oldest rows. Nor is the statutory three-day clock in R.S. 44:33 a deadline to hand over documents; it is a deadline to say when they can be examined. Reading these rows as unanswered requests would be wrong on both counts.
What it is, is a data-integrity gap in a transparency product. A feed that describes itself as the published requests contains 76 that the portal does not serve, and the city’s public search surfaces only one overdue request against a file whose own filter parameters are inert, so the queue cannot be enumerated from outside. This is a single-source observation about the file rather than about the city’s compliance, and the City Attorney’s Office has not been asked to account for it.