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Cost Of Records Keeps Going Up
April 11, 2013 posted by Steve Brownstein
Jan Jarman, a Wichita attorney, wanted to find out why her daughter was denied placement at a local high school.
The school district told her it would cost $1,000 to get the records to find out.
“I thought, ‘This is hideous,’” said Jarman of Maize, a Wichita suburb.
But she paid the money anyway. And she became even more dismayed when she saw that a third of the records consisted only of duplicates of her original request for the records.
Jarman’s experience is not unusual. Other Kansans are facing sticker shock when they seek government records. Governments, they say, have forgotten that the records belong to the public.
“It’s become a source of revenue for some of these government entities, and it has become a way to prevent people from getting information,” said Sen. Jacob LaTurner, a Pittsburg Republican who has introduced a bill to address the problem. “That is not what we should be in the business of. We should cover only the costs that are necessary.”
But governments argue that clerks are sometimes asked for records that require a lot of staff time to produce. And fees keep some individuals from frivolously asking for records just to disrupt government operations, said Kim Winn, League of Kansas Municipalities deputy director.
“The question becomes should all taxpayers have to foot the bill for this one person who is trying to be negative toward the city,” Winn said.
Currently, state law allows governments to charge 25 cents a page and recoup “reasonable fees.” Many agencies also charge for the cost of researching and locating the document, usually based on the hourly salary of a clerk or a technology staffer.
Costs can really jump when agencies also require an attorney to review records to ensure none of the documents is confidential. The average citizen can then be faced with paying a bill of hundreds if not thousands of dollars because that work is based on the attorney’s salary.
LaTurner’s bill is not expected to pass this session but will return in next year’s session.
The bill, with recent changes, would:
• Cap copies at 10 cents.
• Make the first hour of researching and locating the records free. Many searches take less than an hour, government officials say.
• Require the state, not the local government, to set a fee schedule for searches after the first hour. Fees would be based on the salary of the employee doing the work.
“We need to push the reset button on this,” LaTurner said. “It is not the easiest thing to do when folks get used to doing things one way, but it is the right thing to do.”
Doug Anstaett, executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said it’s important to remember that the public actually owns the records.
“This whole discussion goes back to the basic argument, ‘Whose records are these?’” Anstaett said.
But local and state governments, including some in Johnson County, publicly oppose the bill. About 10 officials from around the state turned out for a public hearing in Topeka, and others wrote letters.
Most said they needed to be able to charge additional amounts for research and attorney review.
Representatives from the Johnson County Commission, Lenexa, Overland Park and Shawnee said document requests vary from a simple meeting agenda to thousands of pages of electronic records. In fact, MacKenzie Harvison, Lenexa’s deputy city attorney, said the city already provides a number of simple requests for free.
But all in all, providing records can consume employees’ time, officials said.
“It is imperative that the city have the legal authority to recover the reasonable costs associated with public records requests and thus effectively manage the limited tax dollars available to provide all city services,” Dick Carter Jr., an Overland Park lobbyist, told the state Senate Committee on Federal and State Affairs last month. Carter didn’t return a phone call requesting comment.
Lawyer costs
Another issue looms: paying the cost of lawyers.
Dale Goter, Wichita government relations manager, said cities need attorneys to review the information because the agencies can be liable financially if confidential records are released.
Last year, the city had a request for a council member’s email for one year, a total of about 190,000 emails. The city estimated it would take 40 hours for an attorney to go through the email.
“We can’t take a chance,” Goter said. “Somebody has to look at each email.”
The emails were never released because the cost proved too expensive to the person who wanted them, Goter said.
Missouri prohibits governments from charging for a legal review of records to determine if they contain confidential information, said Jean Maneke, attorney for the Missouri Press Association.
“When they say you need to pay our lawyers’ bill, the cost goes through the roof pretty quickly,” she said.
Instead, Missouri law states that it is the public body’s duty to separate public records from confidential ones, Maneke said.
“Once you get the records to the lawyers, you are no longer researching,” she said.
Kansas law also should make governments responsible for marking documents confidential, Anstaett said.
“It shouldn’t be the public or the media’s responsibility to pay for their (review) and redaction,” he said.
LaTurner said he plans to address attorney fees in his bill.
For now, some are still struggling to pay for documents.
In Gardner, several residents wanted a payroll report from the school district, but the cost for the 24-page report was more than they could afford.
Rhonda Humble, the Gardner News publisher, said the newspaper stepped in with the same request and paid $217.
That was exorbitant for a report that required only a click on a computer, Humble said.
“Who do you go to when they price you out of something?” she asked. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Jarman said she managed to get her school district to reimburse her only about $150 of the $1,000 that she paid. Her husband was so upset that he ran this month as a write-in candidate to the Maize school board.
If the law required records to be free or at least much less expensive, government entities would find a way to get more open records online, making them much cheaper to produce, she said.
“We should create an atmosphere where (the agencies) want to make records more accessible,” Jarman said.
