Dennis Wilson DreamerThe Unending Committments

The law provides that the repositories of public records can charge requestors reasonable fees for issuing the copies of the public records they request. In many cases these are really nominal fees, but on other instances even a brief glance will show that asking for an open record can be luxury every next citizen could hardly afford. Under the Massachusetts state public records law, requestor of a record can be charged 20 cents per page copy, and the jurisdictions have the privilege of setting the cost structure on their own.

Naturally, one would expect the fees to be explained or at least defined by jurisdictions’s public records policies. But when asked about such policy, the Somerville City Solicitor John Gannon replied that the city just doesn’t have any administrative policy on fees. Instead the requestors are being charged for the retrieval of public records that is allowed under the state law. This may be explained by the fact that there are no funds allocated by the city budget for handling public records requests.

The attitude and the state of thing is not the same in different states, not to say about smaller jurisdictions, however. If we take randomly a Glenn County (California) jurisdiction, it does have public records administrative fees policy, which they don’t fail to update following what they are prompted by the general public.

Recently the county’s Board of Supervisors adopted amendments to their previously existing open documents access policy. Further on, requestors will never be charged any fee at all for only viewing public records, even if before being presented for inspection they would require work on redacting them. The fees are only charged for creating copies of existing records at the request of a person or organization who asks for the disclosure.