In response to the lawsuit Keith Hall Properties, Inc. has placed against the City of Leeds, Mayor Eric Patterson issued the following statement.

“The City of Leeds reviews public records requests and does its best to properly comply with those requests. In all situations we follow the law. However, extensive, over burdensome, numerous and requests that are hard to retrieve takes longer to comply with.

A city the size of Leeds only has four administrative personnel that do the day-to-day administrative tasks, which are numerous. It is hard for them to comply immediately with requests that are not small or easy to retrieve. In these cases we were asked on numerous occasions, sometimes twice a week for electronic data, bank data and other hard to retrieve data that to comply was extremely burdensome.

As with all litigation concerning the city we are confident the city will prevail in this matter as we follow the rules and comply with the law.”