A bill approved by the Virginia Senate would have gone a long way toward removing one of the latest tricks bureaucrats use to dodge their legal requirement to furnish documents: informing those requesting information under state or federal FOIA that the search will cost a huge amount of money, thus discouraging them from pursuing the request.
Virginia Senator Danica Roem proposed Senate Bill 1029, which would have capped the hourly rate charged for searching, tying it to either the median salary of a public body or the salary of the person handling the request.
A constituent was charged a shocking $8,800 to obtain a copy of a video of a school bus driver mishandling her young daughter.
The bill garnered plenty of support from those urging greater government transparency and nearly every senator, but it was shunted at the last moment into the General Laws Committee, which effectively killed it for this legislative session.
Pardon our cynicism here, but are we surprised it failed? Not really. What did you expect? Government officials willingly letting the citizenry rabble rummage through their sacrosanct files? Who knows what they might find?
Roem, a former journalist well aware of the importance of FOIA to reporters and private citizens, became incensed when a constituent was charged a shocking $8,800 to obtain a copy of a video of a school bus driver mishandling her young daughter.
“I have fought all five years I’ve been in Richmond to make the Freedom of Information Act more accessible to the requesters of public records,” Roem explained. “Reforming FOIA is perhaps the most challenging topic I’ve encountered in the General Assembly because it’s inherently about convincing legislators to give up some of their own power and the power of local governing bodies, so [that] the pendulum of access is much closer to the center between the custodians of records on the one side and requesters of records on the other side.”
Government officials may publicly praise FOIA but, behind the scenes, they keep coming up with innovative new ways to keep information hidden from the public—information the public is legally entitled to know. They recoil from the light the FOIA brings into the hidden shenanigans of government.
Some find new methods to erase email messages. Or claim it may take years to come up with the information, which is really just a click away. They create new excuses to classify information, claiming they can neither confirm nor deny they have the information at all. They say they’re too busy, loaded down with so many requests they’re overwhelmed and can’t possibly handle them all.
In other words, they’ll joyfully leap to embrace any and all excuses they can to duck their information-providing responsibilities.
But Roem isn’t about to give up: “I am going to continue calling for a FOIA ombudsman at the statewide level to mediate FOIA disputes and to reduce/eliminate FOIA fees whenever possible so your government stops using those fees as a deterrent.… Now it’s just a matter of convincing my colleagues to do the right thing for their constituents. That’s my remaining work.”
Good luck with that.
If bureaucrats and legislators really care about “transparency” and “open government,” shouldn’t they be making it easier to obtain FOIA-requested information, rather than putting up roadblocks to using the system?
The Church of Scientology litigated numerous FOIA cases in the early years of the act, establishing fundamental precedents that included shifting the burden to the government to prove documents are exempt from the FOIA, and establishing that a government agency has an obligation to specify what documents are being withheld and on what grounds.
Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard famously stated, “Democracy depends exclusively on the informedness of individual citizens.”
Excessive fees and barriers to public records access aren’t unique to Virginia. As the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press noted about one state, which is far from an exception: “Unfortunately, it appears there has been a growing trend on the part of many public entities, state and local, to charge fees in excess of or inconsistent with the requirements of the Public Records Act—or to discourage pursuit of public records requests by responding to the requests with unduly large estimates of what the fees will be, or what fees must be paid up front in order for the search to be undertaken.”
Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, wrote: “Requesters have to choose between paying large sums to obtain records they are legally entitled to or giving up on a request that costs too much. The anticipation of high fees produces a chilling effect on future requests.”
It’s the same old song and dance—yet another way to force citizens to drop their requests for information they need because they’re told it will just be too expensive for them to obtain the data.
So is government transparency only for those wealthy enough to afford it?
Don’t we pay enough taxes already?
It’s time to make FOIA easily accessible to all.
