The Globe has an interesting article up about the prohibitive costs of government records requests.
According to the story, one Boston reporter was given
an estimate of $6,600 by a large state agency in response to his requests to review the e-mails of several senior officials. The agency justified the price as the cost of finding the documents, printing them, and reviewing them for personal information that might be exempt from the public records law.
What’s the real purpose for these fees? Is it to recoup the cost of redaction, search, and print? It seems like it would be pretty easy to get around the print / redaction fees, at the very least, by providing the records in electronic format — if I were to be pushing for a legislative fix of an open records law, it would be to mandate electronic format whenever the record is available in digital form (as an email most certainly is) and requested in that format. Well, that and actual enforcement mechanisms.
But there’s no way that printing costs by themselves amount to over $6 thou; on its face, this looks more like brazen disregard for the purpose of the open records law. Perhaps another solution would be to require an itemized receipt – if. there’s some inefficiency driving up the costs of FOI, the requestor – and the public at large – should know about it
The article also brings up a point of general concern in the open records world, which is the increasing shift of the burden of the search onto the requestor. More and more, agencies are demanding that requestors “perfect” their requests by identifying the databases in which the records they seek are stored, or specifying the format (memorandum, report, correspondence) in which particular information is held. While the cost of searching government logs is not to be disregarded, we do have these things called computer keyword searches … and the solution certainly is not to create the circuitous situation in which the agency denies a request because of the lack of specific information in the public sphere.