Public records can come with big price tag

By Sasha Goldstein

Earlier this year Madison reporters were in a flurry to learn more about the problems in Dane County’s 911 Center after it mishandled a call from the cell phone of UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann before she was murdered inside her campus apartment.
           
Matt DeFour of the Wisconsin State Journal was among the reporters chasing the story the hardest. And he immediately ran into roadblocks when Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk’s administration dragged its feet in turning over records about 911 Center complaints.
             
“If they can’t provide me with the documents I seek in a reasonable manner of time for a reasonable fee then there’s no reason I should trust anything that they do,” said DeFour, who covers city and county government.

Falk’s office wanted payment of nearly $2,400 before it would search for citizen complaints in recent years. Many journalists, including DeFour, thought this was ridiculous, especially given the heightened public interest in learning more about longstanding management problems inside the center.

“I should operate under the assumption that they are trying to hide everything,” DeFour said. “It’s almost that for them to operate at maximum public trust they need to start with having a manageable records system that doesn’t cost the public an exorbitant amount of money to find.”

The 911 records case is clearly an extreme example. But the fact is most public records do come with a fee.

Most custodians charge for photocopies, and some charge for searching and compiling records. Others charge for staff time to redact documents, and additional costs for postage or discs can be added on. All these costs can ultimately deter people interested in public information from getting what they need.

Katy Culver, a UW-Madison journalism professor who wrote her dissertation about freedom of information issues, sees a problem with high costs, but doesn’t necessarily feel badly for the news organizations; rather, she says her concern is for the “everyday citizen” that wants information that is rightfully theirs.

“When it comes to the record requester paying for the time of the person who has to retrieve it, philosophically, even if it’s legal, I have a problem with that,” Culver said.  “That says, as a member of the public, I’m a citizen of the state of Wisconsin paying that person’s salary. Now I have to pay that person again?  That seems to me to be contrary to the idea of this basis that these records are owned by the people and that people should have access to them.”

Culver says that sometimes payment is justified, especially with people frequently making “bogus” requests that take up lots of time.  And when information needs to be redacted, the process can be extremely time consuming. 

In Wisconsin, for the most part, costs for public records are not too severe, and most are easily accessed.  Yet in a recent survey of all 72 Wisconsin counties, nearly all public records from five select county departments had some sort of price tag attached.  Generally, the money for the records are for copies and postage, and run from $.25 a page to $5.00 a page.  And some places charged for time spent finding the files, similar to retrieval fees, yet with no indication of how much time was spent and at what cost. 

But nationally, organizations, be it news outlets or community groups, have run up against outlandish fees that many feel are instituted to thwart access to what should be public records. 

A recent example nationally was a case of a news organization requesting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s e-mail records.  According to freedom of information acts, these e-mails are open to the public.  Instead, the Palin camp told the organization that the costs to retrieve these files would be around $15 million, causing uproar around the country over these exorbitant costs.  To Culver, situations like these can change the dynamics of government-citizen interaction.

“I think anytime we can’t have access to the information that is the basis for decisions that our representatives are making then that is a threat to democracy,” Culver lamented.  “We should be able to know what has formed the foundation for any given decision. Millions of dollars? Really?  Don’t the people of the state of Alaska own those e-mails?”

While this case is extreme, it certainly parallels the situation DeFour ran into at the Dane County 911 center.  To him, it seemed the Center was fine with giving him information until they “just decided we don’t want to keep looking, we’re going to charge them for this stuff.”  The arbitrary nature of these charges seems to go against everything the law stands for, and its effectiveness.

“When someone tells me it’s going to cost this obscene amount of money, that makes me more skeptical,” Culver said.  “All of those things are pieces of evidence that this person does not want to release these records to me. And then the question is, why doesn’t this person want to release these records to me?”

Bill Lueders has been at the Isthmus newspaper for 22 years, and in that time has run into plenty of opposition when retrieving public records.  When looking at major costs, Leuders sees payment for litigation to gain access to open records as one of biggest. 

He notes an ongoing case where the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Lakeland Times want access to public records of employee names.  In this case, the Wisconsin Department of Administration and Department of Natural Resources have formed a collective bargaining agreement with their employees that states they will not release the names of employees, virtually undercutting the open records law, according to Lueders.  Yet apparently, their cause has become more principle based rather than news-based.

“It might cost them $40,000 each,” Lueders said.  “It’s a huge roll of the dice.  But at this point, it’s not about newsgathering; it’s about the public’s right to know.”

Though open records rules are explicit in what they say regarding the freedom of information, costs seem like something that will plague the pursuit forever.  Whether a custodian is hiding something by raising costs or if they just don’t feel like looking, money may well continue to be a barrier to “free” information.