Open records laws are supposed to increase government accountability and transparency. They help journalists do their jobs, and have been vital tools in the fight for police accountability. But many public entities muck things up with those requests by jacking up the reported costs to prepare them. The city of San Antonio became the latest brazen open records price gouger, after slapping an $81,333 price tag on a police department email request. According to mySA.com:
The City of San Antonio issued an $81,333 cost estimate Monday in response to an open records request from mySA.com asking for emails regarding suspensions within the San Antonio Police Department.
City legal officials said approximately 5,422 hours of labor at $15 an hour is needed to complete the request, which was filed Oct. 16, 2015 under the Texas Public Information Act.
The requested information includes all emails sent or received by SAPD employees that mentioned suspensions of officers or coverage of those suspensions by the Express-News and mySA.com in 2015.
City officials said the police department's email system does not have a function to search for specific terms across inboxes.
And check out the detailed explanation from the department about the labor involved:
"There are approximately 2,711 SAPD employees. The ITS Department would have to pull all SAPD mailboxes and then transfer those mailboxes onto a designated City employee's computer. The estimated cost is only for the amount of time it would take for the ITS Department to pull all the SAPD mailboxes and then transfer those mailboxes onto the designated City employee's computer. That City employee would then have to enter the requested search terms into each individual mailbox. After all e-mails from all mailboxes were locate, then the employee would have to review for confidential information. Some of the e-mails may need to be sent to the Attorney General's Office and other e-mails may require redactions... There could be an additional labor cost for those e-mails."
So, the police department of the seventh biggest city in the United States doesn’t have a more efficient way to mine emails from its own employees? And 5,422 hours is more than 2.5 years of work. There’s just no way that this process—even at its most tedious—should take more than a few weeks, unless every employee regularly talks about police suspensions or mySA.com. Which seems unlikely.