Jefferson County is considering charging as much as $50 an hour for public- records searches in response to costly and time-consuming “fishing expeditions” by media outlets and others.
Research that takes 15 minutes or less to complete would remain free.
“Staff feels we handle most requests within 15 minutes because the typical records request is specific and straightforward,” said Assistant County Administrator Kate Newman.
At a Sept. 13 briefing, county administrators proposed restructuring fees to recoup the cost of complex research and compilation of records from multiple databases.
Beyond 15 minutes, staff proposes that searches and data manipulation cost $28 an hour for most county divisions, but $43 an hour if the records are required from the county attorney’s office and $50 an hour if they come from the information technology division. Officials would provide a cost estimate in advance.
Other county offices set their own prices. For example, the assessor’s office charges $75 to provide property records to real estate businesses.
The county also could refuse a request requiring data manipulation, Newman said, because the Colorado Open Records Act doesn’t require it.
The act allows a government agency or department to charge a “reasonable” hourly fee for manipulation of data to generate a record in a form not already in use. The act states such a fee can’t exceed the actual cost of working on the data. Metro-area counties such as Boulder, Denver and Arapahoe already charge hourly research fees.
Currently, Jefferson County doesn’t charge for research, but paper copies of records are billed at 25 cents per page after the first five pages, which are free.
Jefferson County commissioners asked staff to research what other jurisdictions charge for records before they revisit the issue in the next few weeks.
In 2009, Newman said, Jefferson County put many of its purchasing records online as part of its Transparent Jeffco initiative.
“We believe a lot of the information being requested is already online,” Newman said.
Staff would prefer to spend time making more records available online rather than researching massive requests for information that require investigating, cross-referencing files and creating records that don’t exist, she said.
“It takes more and more time,” Newman said. “Requests are more and more broad and vague.”
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, Assistant County Administrator Kate Newman’s name was misspelled.
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