Once again I went into the town hall today to file a FOIL request and pay for some items I FIOLed previously. I had to ultimately cut in half what I requested and wanted because the town has an ordinance that it will charge twenty five cents per paper copy for information.
That really doesn’t sound excessive, but when your request totals 500 or so pages it adds up. Unfortunately I had to get less information to bring the total to an afffordable thirty bucks instead of more than a hundred bucks. Today’s purchase was a copy of the 2008 Big Tree Volunteer Fire Company Fire Contract and a copy of a recording of an illegal Variance Appeals Board Meeting held back in September.
Both of these are open public information and they both should be placed online free of charge but they aren’t. Instead the town charges for these documents and in the case of the Variance Appeals Board stuff, it was an old tape recording and had to be put on a CD by an outside company because the town clerks office supposedly has no idea how to transfer a tape to a CD. So that was fifteen bucks itself.
Here are my thoughts. Residents of the town shouldn’t be charged anything more than the cost of the supplies to copy and record this stuff. We already pay for labor services in our taxes and any labor request of town office staff should be free of charge to its tax payers.
Anything charged over that is simply a double tax on our town taxpayers. In this case the cost of 500 sheets of paper should be approximately five bucks because that is the retail price of a five hundred sheet ream of paper. Furthermore the ink for printing this is about another five bucks. A typical ink jet printer cartridge costs about $25 and that cartridge lasts for approximately 2500 to 3000 sheets printed. I know this because I own both a commercial quality ink jet and laser printer.
So in the case of the fire contract FOIL of a five hundred sheet request, it should have been about ten bucks for all the info I wanted. Then I would have had a copy of all the 2008 fire contracts for every fire company in Hamburg. Instead I had to settle for only the BTVFC fire contract.
For the case of the audio recording of the Variance Appeals Board, this should have cost no more than the cost of a CD that I could have given to the clerk for free. This town department needs to come into the twenty first century and purchase the necessary equipment that records directly to a laptop or CD. Using an old unconvertible tape recorder is stupid and just plain ignorant if you ask me.
Finally, what are your thoughts? Have you been charge ridiculously for something like this in the past?
Nice job Ford, the money you spent on the foil goes into the general fund which is used to fund BTFC. I agree they can put the budget on line and that is 100 pages, the minutes for ALL meetings should be posted on line also. I am sure that the town has a computer that would convert your audio file. Why not record with a computer during the meeting? The problem is that many of the political appointees do not have a clue how to operate a computer. A audio file can also be loaded onto the website and we would not need an office full of people to assist people as they did 50 years ago. Cut a few of the jobs in the office and use the money to set up 21st centruy equipment.