July 08, 2009
The Cost of Free Information
"But it hasn't been cheap- the State has wasted THOUSANDS of hours of YOUR time and shelled out some two million of YOUR dollars to respond to 'opposition research'- that's money NOT going to fund teachers or troopers- or safer roads. And this political absurdity, the 'politics of personal destruction' ... Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight. And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn't cost them a dime so they're not going to stop draining public resources- spending other peoples' money in their game." [ex-Gov. Sarah Palin, 7/3/09]
How much do public records requests cost? According to ex-Gov. Sarah Palin they have cost the state of Alaska $2 million, and $500,000 to her personally. On the other hand, at 3CR we frequently make public records requests to federal, state and local bodies on behalf of our clients. Hence we take a keen interest in the economics of retreiving information. In the case of Alaska, agencies assess copying costs plus labor if the production exceeds five person-hours. An agency may waive or reduce a fee if it is in the "public interest," and waive a fee of $5 or less if the fee is less than the cost to the public agency to arrange for payment. [http://www.legis.state.ak.us/cgi-bin/folioisa.dll/stattx03/query-*/doc/%7B@15441]
The state with the costliest information in our experience has been Louisiana. Records in that state generally run $1 a page; some local governments also charge $5 for the first page. On the other hand, in Washington state agencies frequently send scanned or electronic data at no charge. The federal government is fairly mercurial. Our requests for congressional correspondence with the State Department are frequently processed without costs. On the other hand, the Treasury recently responded to our request for electronic correspondence regarding the TARP program with a $2,300 cost estimate. It should be noted that time, not money, is the biggest concern with federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests; we recently received a voluminous amount of material on one Congressman from the State Department...in response to a request filed in 2006.
Of course, pricing can also depend on the temperament of the official producing the records. During one county executive race, our request for a copy of all emails by the incumbent received a cost estimate of $80,600, citing 1,240 person/hours needed at $65 an hour. (Our counter-offer of $5.86 for 15 minutes of work to copy one Outlook .pst file was not well-received)
As to the charge of "political absurdity," we can only hope that public records requests in Alaska have costs taxpayers money when it has been in the "public interest," as required by law. Presumably that interest matches Palin's.
Posted on July 08 at 01:18 PM