After the Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) found that Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) officials were violating the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by asking Adam Osmond to pay over $40,000 for the production of records, the agency is once again asking him to pay over $16,000 for responsive records.
Osmond recently received a $16,644.14 invoice from DECD, billing him for an hourly rate of time for various employees who had been involved in searching for records responsive to the request. The invoice covered work on the request done through November 10. Osmond told Inside Investigator the invoice was also accompanied by responsive documents, but he had not reviewed them to see whether they were complete.
In August, the FOIC ruled that DECD officials could not require Osmond to pay $41,943.25 for 167,773 pages of records Osmond requested in electronic format. That invoice was based on a per-page copying fee for records that Osmond had requested be provided electronically.
While FOIA allows public agencies to charge for the production of records in limited circumstances, fees cannot exceed the cost agencies incur in producing records. While agencies can charge a per-page copying fee for making copies of physical records, they cannot charge per-page copying fees for electronic records because there is no cost to copying them.
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