TORONTO

Officials in Mayor Rob Ford’s office say they’re getting buried by freedom of information requests.

Ford’s staffers were scrambling Friday to meet a deadline to comply with a storm of municipal freedom of information (FOI) requests — most that were filed in the wake of the mayor’s crack cocaine controversy that blew up in May.

Since Ford was elected to the office in 2010, he and his office have been hit with 175 FOI requests. City staff confirmed Ford’s office has been the subject of 63 FOI requests this year alone. By comparison, former mayor David Miller’s office had 30 FOI requests during his entire two terms.

Sunny Petrujkic, the mayor’s spokesman, said the office has been overwhelmed by the requests and now has four staff members spending most of their days trying to comply with the process.

“We’re doing our best to deal with all the requests that come,” Petrujkic told the Toronto Sun Friday. “This mayor is committed to transparency and accountability.

“Our goal is to meet all the deadlines, in situations where it is not possible to meet the deadlines we’ve requested extensions.”

The most pressing of the requests is a Sept. 3 deadline to respond to 29 requests from several media outlets, including the Sun, asking them to disclose internal communications from the time period when Ford was under siege by the drug allegations.

The Tuesday deadline is roughly 85 days after the initial FOI’s were filed.

The Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, enacted by the province, gives city governments 30 days to respond to requests but allows for extensions when requested.

Petrujkic couldn’t say Friday if the mayor’s office will be asked for an extension to comply with the FOI requests.

“We feel the public needs to know (what we’re dealing with),” he said. “We are going to do everything in our power to meet all the FOI requests that are now putting significant pressures on us delivering on our daily functions and serving the residents and constituents of the city.”

A mayor’s office official speaking on background slammed the “wide scope” of some of the requests describing them as “frivolous” and “just fishing expeditions.”

“They’re not asking for specific key words or timeframes, they are just asking for everything,” he said. “Some of these things are thousands of pages, they are asking for every e-mail (sent or received by) a specific staff person.”

The official went on to argue members of the media were not members of the public.

“These aren’t requests coming from members of the public who are concerned about a specific issue,” he said. “It is not coming from Joe Citizen.”

Petrujkic downplayed the idea some mayor’s office employees see the FOI’s as “fishing expeditions” by the media.

“Whether it is a media request or requests from private individuals we want to make sure they are all complied with,” he said.

Asked why the mayor doesn’t just hire more staff, Petrujkic said that’s not an option.

“This is the way the mayor likes to run his office,” he said.