Spokane adjusts public records charges in response to recent state Attorney General’s inquiry.
As noted in our June 13th update to our earlier story on challenges to the City of Spokane’s dramatic increases in public records copying charges (“Hey Pal, This Ain’t No Kinko’s”), Spokane City Hall has withdrawn its February 1, 2009 “Basic Fee Schedule” and replaced it with a new schedule that went into effect Monday, June 15th.
The decision came less than two weeks after state Assistant Attorney General Tim Ford (who serves as the state’s Open Government Ombudsman), wrote a letter to the city questioning the city’s unusually high fees and asking that the fees be reviewed to make sure they were consistent with the state’s model rules for public records compliance.
The new fee schedule reverts to the pre-2009 policy for basic, black and white photocopies of requested
documents. Now, as before, the first ten pages are free and copies of 11 pages are more will be billed at 15¢ per page.
On the other hand, the new policy actually raises the fees for records on audiotape from $15 per tape to $20 for the first tape and $5 for each additional tape. The fee for CD copies is reduced from $15 to $6, and there is also a reduction in DVD charges from $15 to $11 per DVD.
“The Center’s Open Government Program has been working to get the City and the County into compliance with the both the spirit and the letter of Washington’s Public Records Act,” says Center for Justice Chief Catalyst Breean Beggs. “The City’s recent change is a big improvement but they still have a ways to go until they are only charging for the actual costs of reproducing the records, not the time needed to find them.”
The new City Hall revision doesn’t change the fees charged by the Spokane Police Department which, as of Monday, remained at 90¢ for the first page of black and white copies and 30¢ for each additional page. Likewise, the $15 per CD/DVD charged by the City of Spokane/County Sheriff Records Division remains in effect.
–CFJ
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