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The costs to a city, county, or state agency for digitization under state Freedom of Information laws is zero dollars. The costs of records requests are entirely borne by the requestor. We pay for the copies (but only the actual duplication costs, no mark-up allowed), we pay for the labor (at the government worker’s actual salary), we pay for the physical media like a USB hard drive or DVD’s, we pay for the shipping. All the clerk needs to do is agree that the Freedom of Information request is legitimate and not prohibited by any exceptions to the law. And for that, the government employee has free legal counsel available to them in New York, in the form of the Committee on Open Government (COOG), which provides free Advisory Opinions of questions of the law. They answer questions by both e-mail and phone within 24-48 hours, from both requestors and agencies. Other states have similar programs available. So yeah, this digitization is actually totally free to the government. We bear the costs, not them. ...unless they ignore the law entirely, in which case they get the pleasure of paying for their attorneys, and our attorney fees too. We’ve won those twice so far. (by the way, the “corruption” in Albany line is a song lyric from the musical “Hamilton”) |