I thought the Times went bankrupt?

How are they going to pay even 25 cents a page?

Maybe the 25 cents a page is a little high (or maybe, you could let customers copy themselves at a self serve copier if they wanted to pay less). But even if the charge should be a little cheaper, I can see no reason why anyone should have a problem with the other requirements. In the case of those who already owe $$: of course people should have to pay up before demanding more services that they likely won't ever pay for if they're already unwilling to pay what they owe. Why should the government provide a costly service for free to these individuals? And as for those who never pick up the records, what possible justification is there for them not to pay?? The agency has already incurred the copy machine/paper/personnel costs of copying the documents, and thus should be reimbursed. This is like saying that just because you didn't pick up a custom product that you had made specially for you and which cannot be useful to anyone else, you shouldn't have to pay for it! No way--in both cases, this just seems like people cheating the system. Why should taxpayers be picking up the tab for their unpaid or unused copies?

It's sloppy to assume that the costs for the State - who don't make copies in really high volumes and presumably pay state employee salaries and benefits -- is in anyway similar to the costs at Kinko's.

Bear in mind that government copying costs are not parallel to Kinko's in a very significant way: any agency that deals with personal information (like SSNs in police reports, or student information in educational records) has to copy records not once, but twice. Once to redact the personal information, and again so that the requestor can't just read through the black marker redaction and steal your SSN.

But they can steal it from your divorce decree.

all records need to be available for inspection. sometimes the search will provide hundreds of emails or report pages and only a few pages are wanted and those are the only pages the requester should have to pay for. most agencies in the city don't provide anything but electronic records - amazingly they have no notes of meetings or telephone messages only emails and reports. they avoid the spirit of public disclosure by not creating notes at meetings (they have a policy) or destroying hand written documents.

everything should be put on the net and made available for everyone to see, after redacting private info.

and if someone is fighting bills, they should not be denied the material needed to fight because they don't have the money or feel the agency needs to win a judgment first.

the oversight, public disclosure provides us all, is worth far more than the cost to the agencies.

@6 can I see your drug records?

Thanks!

The Washington Public Records Act (PRA) is a series of laws designed to guarantee that the public has access to public records of government bodies at all levels in Washington.

The introduction to the statute explains the reason for the PRA: "The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created."

to what extent does excessive cost interfere with the clear intent and right of the people? This is also an excellent statement in how it so clearly illustrates the proper relationship between the governed and their government

Costs should be reasonable to provide public access to records of those doing the public's business. Raising costs to 25 cents a page is another way to deny the public reasonable access to information. It should be kept at 15 cents a page.

"A small dose of day-to-day realism: we only have so much time and energy, and we therefore have to prioritize what we spend our political/personal capital on. I am amazed that when their fellow citizens are dying in a war built on lies and being tossed out of their homes and jobs, some Americans worry more about access to public records. Just beyond me."

actually if I had drug records you could get them. if you have sex crime records, they would be available.

the major point of PD is not getting the public records of non-government people but rather public records of government business which would include the lies of war and other very relevant issues.

private citizens with the power of PD help keep the government in line.

so does the press

freedom of information, public disclosure, etc. are good for democracy.

oh arbiter, I support your right to protest foie gras and others the right to protest gay rights etc. etc.

public disclosure can be used in those efforts as well

Did Sonoma Foie Gras tell you that, Bethany? Really? The very same Sonoma Foie Gras for whom the torment of geese acts as a Soviet-style full-employment program said that? Amazing! Who could have predicted that the Sonoma Foie Gras would think so highly of the job that Sonoma Foie Gras is doing?

Like so many of her stupid credulous hack colleagues at our daily papers, Bethany Jean Clement fails to ask the obvious follow-up questions: Should the statement by a foie gras producer that their factory is humane be taken at face value? Is there any other evidence to the contrary out there?

@12, I am not protesting foie gras. I don't give a shit about it. But Erica and a bunch of her friends made a big whoopty-doo about how people should spend their time on the bigger issues. And I agree. I want her to stop wasting time on her pet issues and start focusing on bigger problems. I'm sick of these lazy bourgeois "journalists" sitting around sniping because Zipcar doesn't go to their neighborhood, or because somebody carted their kid around in a Chariot in the snow, or someone called Clinton a "bitch". It's a time waster, and not one of Erica's blathering posts has done anything to fix the bigger issues.

I don't think people realize that there are a lot of frivolous (or deliberately malicious) public records requests made for no other reason than to force public employees to do onerous searches and extracts (at public expense, mind you) when they have other work they need to be doing. In my particular job, we are frequently harassed by anti-union zealots who demand we provide email addresses of all employees in a particular classification to them, as a public records request. We are required to provide this information, but because we don't have a database that has both employee classification and email addresses in it (they're in completely separate systems), this requires manual, and time-consuming, compilation.

Now, the pollyanna idea here is to create another database, which contains both fields. Why? Because anti-union zealots insist on their right to harass and bombard employees in that particular classification with their anti-union spam? Creating and maintaining databases is not labor- (or resource-) neutral.

Your tax dollars are paying for public employees to satisfy the zealotry of (mostly) right-wing nutcases.

1:09 shouldn't you be doing a PDR?