[tptacek]

The discourse over PACER fees recapitulates a very common public policy conundrum, and we should all be more thoughtful about discussing it.

In the municipality where I live, we're statutorily required to replace lead service lines[†] within the next 5-10 years (I forget how many). The municipality replaces the trunk lines, and homeowners are required to replace the last hop at their own (significant) expense.

Naturally, people are extremely upset about this. They're all being forced to spend a bunch of money, out of the blue. They all want the municipality to pay for their own service line replacement. Other municipalities are doing this.

But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other, because the ultimate source of funds for the things the municipality pays for is our property tax levy. In fact, having the municipality pay for homeowner service line replacement is straightforwardly regressive: it's a subsidy to homeowners, paid in part out of the pockets of people who don't own.

A similar dilemma faces PACER. Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. Court records can, of course, be made "free". But nothing is actually free. To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are... funding the legal profession.

That doesn't mean I think it's great that PACER charges. Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic. But it's also very cheap. I'd imagine that most of the use cases for which it isn't below the cost noise floor are cases that serve professions, in which case I have to ask what the public policy case is for subsidizing those uses.

I don't know, things are complicated.

[†] Added context: lead service lines in Chicagoland aren't necessarily immediately problematic, because the water management department here carefully manages the supply to ensure lead is mineralized; if you test your lead-service tap water for lead, you won't find any.

[BobbyTables2]

The two aren’t quite identical.

The municipality could service all the homes and pay for it with taxes, probably using their own people or a negotiated contract.

The private (and usually no -savvy) individual has much less negotiating power and is going to get taken to the cleaners by a plumber. Three houses in a street are likely to have 3 different plumbers on 3 different dates.

It’s just like that the cost per square foot to pave a single driveway vs the entire sidewalk or foundations for a whole neighborhood.

[AnthonyMouse]

The other side of that coin is that the homeowner is paying their own money and is therefore going to actually negotiate or shop around for the best price. Whereas the government is spending someone else's money and then the way the person choosing who to award the contract to gets to have more money in their own pocket is under the table.

[cucumber3732842]

The buyer has next to no negotiating leverage on a small (to the seller) job they're being compelled to purchase by the government.

[AnthonyMouse]

When there are multiple providers their leverage is the ability to choose a different one. Consider food: You have to buy it or you die, yet everything from farmers to cafes operate on razor-thin margins, why? Because it's a commodity and the customer can go across the street.

The prerequisite here, however, is that it's actually a competitive market. Two suppliers colluding or mirroring each other doesn't count.

[cucumber3732842]

That's the magic of it. You can't just conjure plumbers out of thin air, have some handyman do it, threaten to have your uncle from another state do it, etc, etc, because in order to get your magic piece of paper that says you've done the work the person doing it needs to be licensed by (an agency deputized by) the government and that intentionally takes time to constrain supply.

If this were the government telling everyone to buy landscaping services or something else that's not intentionally supply constrained by the government to benefit incumbent you'd have an argument.

[AnthonyMouse]

Obviously the argument is that they shouldn't constrain the supply.

[bebe83939]

Plus homeowner may decide to skip electric utility completely, and go with isolated home solar.

Extreme case is south africa, blackout 30% of time, and people are not allowed local solars (it makes goverment look bad).

[mistrial9]

other extreme case, California, where electricity costs are a large multiple of US averages, and the utility company owns military equipment. PG&E + minions monitor every connection, and charge to connect to the grid. High quality solar cannot be connected to the grid by regulation, not law, unless supervised by PG&E and minions. Naturally the regulations de facto equate to a monthly bill in a certain non-free range, no matter how much effort the client site makes.

[bebe83939]

> High quality solar

> no matter how much effort the client site makes

I doubt solar provides stable predictable current 24/7 with warranty amd penalties. That is the hard part, and what it takes to be "high quality".

State sized grid is not a joke.

[mistrial9]

checkout "batteries" for new info

agree, state grid is no joke

[thrance]

Now apply that logic to healthcare. Single payers are able to get much better deals.

[tptacek]

Not really, no. Medicare wildly overpays for everything compared to the rest of the world.

[skinfaxi]

Wouldn't a more apt comparison be between Medicare and non-government insurers in the US?

[AnthonyMouse]

There isn't really any way to make that comparison because Medicare provides a different type of benefits to a different subset of the population. Private insurers don't offer policies to the elderly that cover the things Medicare covers because those things are already covered by Medicare.

People sometimes try to measure things like "overhead" but that also doesn't really work. If one entity pays $10M in claims but half of them are unknowingly fraudulent and another spends $1M to prevent the fraud, the first one is paying $10M with 0% overhead for fraud detection while the other is paying $5M with 20% overhead for fraud detection. Comparing the percentages implies the second one has "higher overhead" but it's also the one paying $6M instead of $10M.

And the same thing bleeds into the prices for specific services. A provider will happily give you a "20% discount" on the price if you don't bother to check that half their claims are fake. Then you're actually paying them 60% more while the books show them charging you 20% less per procedure.

On top of that, the market for many medical services in the US is extremely captured. The majority of states still have Certificate of Need laws, which are literally laws prohibiting new providers from entering the market if the local government (i.e. the incumbents) think the result would be "too much" competition. The AMA consistently lobbies to limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage, and doctors who immigrate from other countries, even licensed physicians in countries with first rate healthcare and medical education systems, can't practice in the US without doing a US residency, which in turn consumes one of the residency slots and prevents immigration from alleviating the shortage whatsoever.

The premise is that competitive markets result in lower prices, not that uncompetitive markets do.

[hn_acker]

Medicare covers only a minority of the population but (and?) relies heavily on the general US private healthcare system. At minimum, Medicare cost is affected by high drug prices (perpetuated by lobbying-influenced government avoidance of price controls), relatively high coverage denials (which Congress and the executive branch refuse to regulate), and lack of vision or dental coverage unless people use "Medicare" Advantage (which currently gives private insurers too much leeway to raise costs for the government without a corresponding healthcare benefit [1]).

Anyway, I think parent comment to yours is using single-payer in the sense that implies universal healthcare [2].

[1] https://www.kff.org/medicare/how-medicare-pays-medicare-adva...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_healthcare

[tptacek]

Drug prices are less than 10% of all US health care spending. Drive all drug prices to zero dollars and we get a grocery store circular discount on total health costs.

[nativeit]

I see this kind of argument a lot, but I have to assume the very noticeable ignorance of collective bargaining power in this framing is intentional?

[AnthonyMouse]

"Collective bargaining" is essentially a strategy for contending with a monopolist by getting your own. There are three major problems with it.

The first is that it doesn't actually get you out of the monopoly. If there is an uncompetitive market and you're required by law (or otherwise compelled) to purchase their services, making the buyer a monopsony still doesn't give them any leverage because they have to contract for the services even if the provider won't lower the price, and the provider knows that.

The second is that the purchasing bureaucracy then becomes a target for capture and has all the wrong incentives to resist it. They control a trillion dollars in purchasing power but it's really about a million providers getting an average of a million dollars each. That's the recipe for doing something inefficient a million times over because every provider wants to get $2M instead of $500k and will lobby for regulations or offer kickbacks or commit fraud to get it, and the public doesn't have the bandwidth to apprehend a million individual cases of things going crooked when each one is only 0.0001% of the total. And meanwhile "a million providers" still doesn't imply there is real competition to get you out of (1), because a radiology lab in Philadelphia isn't a substitute for a neurologist in Denver or vice versa.

The third is that you still don't have any sensible pricing mechanism. Even if you have a monopsony, how do they come up with a price to offer? Dart board? Demanding to look at the supplier's accounts, thereby giving the supplier an incentive to waste money because they're getting cost plus? The only real way to give them the incentive to do it for less if they can is to have alternate suppliers so that they each lose the contract if they don't offer the best price, but not having that was the original problem that "collective bargaining" was supposed to address.

Whereas if you instead focus on sustaining a competitive market then "collective bargaining" is just wasteful overhead, because the competition is already keeping margins thin so there is little more to extract from the supplier and you're only unnecessarily subjecting yourself to a layer of indirection and the principal-agent problem.

[nativeit]

The reason a vendor can fleece public services in the first place is, somewhat ironically, the limited access to free public records by independent journalists. I’d reckon we need more freedom of information, more regulatory oversight, and more participation by the public. The cynicism that governments are inherently dishonest and feckless (rather than being designed as-such by the self-interested lobbies pushing this cynicism) is one big reason such corruption has become so prevalent.

[lesuorac]

I've always thought the reason a vendor can fleece the public is a mixture of 2 things.

1) You get elected by convincing voters to vote for you. Which is not the same as actually getting the lowest prices.

2) Core competency has been stamped out of a lot of government agencies and so if you're a skill negotiator you want to be collecting the commission from the sales contract to the government as opposed to a low salary from being the government agent.

So at the end of the day, making all these contracts public wouldn't fix future ones from being issued. Although I'm still for more sunshine.

[ozozozd]

Exactly what I was going to say. And exactly what’s intended: for someone to make money.

[IIAOPSW]

As a non-attorney that has also used PACER, I don't think of it in quite these terms. Sure maybe there's some level of public subsidy by making it free, but like you say, relative to the legal profession that subsidy per lawyer is at the noise floor. On the other hand, the value of making it free to people outside the legal profession is well worth the degree to which we'd be subsidizing the people in it.

For example, journalists. There's enormous investigative journalism value in the documents that have been filed in court. People say all sorts of shit in affidavits which turns out to be relevant outside the context they intended it for. PACER should be free, if nothing else than for the public interest value of its content (outside as well as inside the court).

[tptacek]

Right, but I fixate on the fact that we could easily solve the journalism problem without making it free. Just raise the free tier cap.

Making PACER entirely free is regressive, absent some new scheme to single out the lawyers (like a dedicated lawyer tax or something, which runs into constitutional problems.)

[gucci-on-fleek]

> Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. Court records can, of course, be made "free". But nothing is actually free. To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are... funding the legal profession.

Couldn't you just add a "are you a lawyer" checkbox, and only charge a fee if you check it? It would be trivial to lie here, but I doubt that many lawyers would want to risk getting caught defrauding the government when doing so would only save them a few thousand dollars a year.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Lawyers don't use PACER. They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated.

PACER is more or less journalists, activists, and so forth.

The fees PACER charges doesn't reflect the cost that the government bears to make it available (it's much higher). It's a poor service, seemingly designed to discourage its own use. And the bureaucracy within the court system obligated to provide it seems to feel that it's far more than a burden but even an intrusion into matters that the courts would keep from the public, were it allowed.

[ameister14]

>Lawyers don't use PACER. They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated.

I don't know about that; I've used PACER a fair amount, despite also using Westlaw.

[howard941]

Attorneys use PACER (fed by CM/ECF) to retrieve pleadings. Very little is done with hardcopy anymore.

[gucci-on-fleek]

> They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated.

So I'm not familiar with this area at all, but aren't only the major rulings annotated? Based off of this sibling comment [0] (which I have no idea is correct or not), PACER is mainly used for exhibits, briefs, and motions, and I wouldn't expect for LexisNexis and Westlaw to annotate these.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48605601

[tptacek]

It's easy to come up with practical segmentation strategies and we should pursue them. An obvious one is jacking up the free tier, from $30/quarter to something much higher, like $1000/quarter.

I mean, maybe the right answer is just to make the whole thing free. I don't know. I just know it's more complicated than the standard message board discourse suggests.

[SkiFire13]

$30/quarter doesn't look like a "free tier" in the first place

[sokoloff]

It is. If you incur less than $30 in PACER charges in a quarter, they waive the bill.

[awinter-py]

this is right if pacer is expensive to operate for a real reason

but 1) it has high revenue which 2) is required to go to expenses, which 3) it may not be going to expenses

(per freelaw project, at least https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/)

courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations; it's reasonable to say 'govt is required to feed new data to courtlistener and friends', gov doesn't have to operate pacer anymore, everyone is happy

[tptacek]

My expectation would be that the costs of operating the PACER system encompass a lot of basic costs of handling filing and docket management that aren't relevant to passive consumers of PACER, but that don't have a clean interface to charge at otherwise, in much the same way that gas taxes are in significant part a tax to fund maintenance of roadways.

[toomuchtodo]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570

> I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-...

Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158 - August 2020 (149 comments)

[tptacek]

That's missing my point. I too believe that the cost of serving static files is effectively epsilon. But that's not all PACER fees pay for.

[toomuchtodo]

Your point is taken, it’s simply a philosophical debate between public funding and user fees, and if the system is exposing the right folks to the relevant majority of costs vs socializing the costs broadly. My position is that if the costs are relatively insignificant, socializing them is simply more efficient. I accept others may have a different philosophical take. I suppose user and landing fees in US general and commercial aviation are a similar analogy for comparison in the support of fee collection.

[awinter-py]

fwiw the US judiciary agrees with you https://www.uscourts.gov/file/62983/download

> The judiciary opposes measures that shift the costs of providing access to PACER to litigants filing cases in federal courts, unduly hindering access to justice

That's their response to the open courts act of 2021, which would have made pacer free.

As a user of both courtlistener and pacer, I mostly believe freelaw can deliver a better cheaper equivalent than what exists, even including the submission systems. (With the caveat that I have used state court e-file systems but only briefly touched the federal ones).

If pacer revenue is paying the filing clerks, I probably feel differently; clerks are necessary components of the system who cannot be replaced by technology today.

[lukeschlather]

We know where all the money in this system is: it's in LexisNexis and Westlaw. Each of them has revenue over $3B, individually. Presumably they have some lesser-known competitors. PACER fees are $150M. What percentage of PACER fees are paid by LexisNexis and Westlaw anyway in the course of their data ingestion? I'm not sure it really matters, we could simply restructure with a new tax on value-add services like LexisNexis that pulls in $200M, make PACER free, and everyone would be happier, probably including the value-add legal service providers.

[tptacek]

Wait why are we taxing LexisNexis? Making PACER free makes sense (though, again: doing that is regressive); it's a government-run service that is the system of record for court filings.

[lukeschlather]

You asserted that we need the money PACER fees bring in - taxing businesses like LexisNexis seems like a way to get the same kind of money that wouldn't be regressive, if we really need to replace that revenue, and it comes from more or less the same place, without being paid by people who can't afford it.

[tptacek]

The federal government can apply fee structures to services it offers. It cannot in fact just randomly point at things private organizations do and tax them.

[lukeschlather]

Really? Here are 3 examples, I'm not sure what you mean, Congress has extremely broad taxing authority. If what I suggest is unconstitutional (I'm curious to hear your justification for that) they could probably do it by putting terms of use on the PACER data, have a paid tier specifically for orgs that resell the data.

* Sports gambling excise tax: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_telephone_excise_tax

* Indoor tanning services: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

[tptacek]

Fair enough, I was thinking about what the government could do without major congressional action. But still, not going to happen. For many reasons, but one of them is constitutional.

WestLaw is expressive. It's tricky to do targeted taxes on expressive organizations. Pesky First Amendment.

The big reason nothing like this is going to happen is that there are like 40 nerds in the country that care about it, and then a huge majority of the population that is reasonably well served by the current compromise.

[ProllyInfamous]

>Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic

You would really enjoy reading Chief Justice Roberts' end of 2023 State of the US Federal Courts paper [†][ <6 pages ]. He discusses how their system has always been antiquated, resistant to change... but how significantly LLMs are going to change commoners' (like us!) access to the judicial system.

There are also many humorous musings about past Justices' hatred of new technology, and that ~"if some former Justices could they'd have gotten rid of most associates, too; but they were still technologically necessary"~.

[†] <https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-en...>

----

My own forty-something brother is currently a state-level judge, and he still uses a typewriter, by choice, for more-privileged correspondence.

State of our times, l-onestar.

[stult]

> A similar dilemma faces PACER. Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces.

One of those protectionist policies is charging for PACER itself.

The costs of running PACER are absolutely trivial in comparison to the costs of running the judiciary. To the point that even bringing the point up is disingenuous to the point that it discredits everything else you say.

Case law is law. People are required to obey the law. They should be able to access the law so they can know how to follow it. It's that simple.

[ipython]

The problem is - we are all required to abide by the law. And the law is at least partially determined by precedent established by previous court cases. But those cases are behind a paywall.

Yes everything costs money. But we expect that the government would provide services for the greater good of its citizens.

I can step foot in some of the greatest museums in the world for free in downtown dc. As a citizen I can get (and have) a reading card for the Library of Congress. For free. Are these services being provided by volunteers? No. My tax dollars pay for it. So should it fund electronic record keeping for legal proceedings.

[hypersoar]

Federal judicial opinions are readily available online. The circuit courts and Supreme Court--i.e., the courts which actually establish precedent--post all of their opinions on their own websites. If your concern is knowing what courts (at least federal courts, where PACER is used) are saying so that you can follow the law, it's all out there for free. What PACER hosts is the rest of the case records: exhibits, briefs, motions, etc.

[tptacek]

You're almost there but not completing the circuit. Could tax dollars pay for "free" PACER access? Absolutely they could. But is that policy distributionally (a) regressive, (b) progressive, or (c) neutral? The answer is probably (a). The tax dollars come out of everybody's pocket. The benefits accrue disproportionately to a wealthy professional class.

I think we're close to a pretty nice balance in the status quo: RECAP, and a free tier. If it's me, what you do is jack the free tier up from $30 to $1000.

[ipython]

Who ultimately pays the fees from pacer? You’re telling me that, out of the goodness of their hearts, the lawyers take it out of their own paycheck?

You’d better believe that cost, however small, is passed along to the clients of those law firms.

Now if that cost were to go to zero- no I don’t think the lawyers will charge less. But I do think that even the presence of a paywall reinforces the perceived scarcity of the legal profession. My thought is that if these documents were available more freely, we would see more democratization of the legal system.

For example, small claims doesn’t require legal representation. But knowing previous case law could definitely help even a lay person prepare a case.

[delusional]

> You’d better believe that cost, however small, is passed along to the clients of those law firms.

This line of reasoning devolves into pure power politics. If we assume costs would always be passed down, all public taxation policy will always land at the feet of the hungry, the only people who are unable to pass on the cost. For any taxation or redistribution policy to make sense, we must agree that some amount of the cost will manifest as lower demand or slimmer margins. Some of the cost must be born by the law firm.

> My thought is that if these documents were available more freely, we would see more democratization of the legal system.

Does that actually make sense? My understanding of the legal profession and the game theory around it, is that it's a supply side constrained system. If you're being charged, and might go to jail should you fail to defend yourself, you're going to hire the absolutely most expensive lawyer you can get your hands on. It doesn't really matter if you could defend yourself, it's just not worth the risk.

[ipython]

Power politics? That seems a bit extreme. I’m just advocating for free access to more of the legal system.

I gave the example of museums and libraries which I assume we all agree are public goods and worth funding with tax dollars. In your example with criminal justice, we fund public defenders as well.

Knowledge as a whole is a supply side constrained system (maybe changing with llms??). As we have experienced, parents are more than willing to pay any price to send their kids to the most expensive (exclusive) college they can afford, to include going into debt. Yet we still find it useful as a society to fund public school and libraries so we can democratize knowledge to those with the interest to do so.

I think it’s been quite obvious for the past twenty years that any additional cost ultimately is passed to the customer. In the early 2000s the “fuel surcharges” started slipping in. Then telco companies started adding on fees for any compliance regime they were subject to. And so on it goes.

[tptacek]

Sure, that's absolutely the case, but people overwhelmingly aren't involved in federal litigation. PACER is operating in an entirely different universe to local small claims courts.

[ipython]

Admittedly a niche use case but I used pacer to research tcpa cases in order to bring litigation (successfully) against telemarketers in local courts.

[iamnothere]

Except for corporate lawyers and a handful of highly successful biglaw attorneys, the law profession isn’t as profitable as it once was. Student loans and creeping costs have done a lot of damage. Same with many doctors who are having to go work for group practices owned by PE firms.

Free PACER access might actually help average people get better legal representation by reducing the cost burden on the small independent attorneys who don’t mingle with execs and politicians at the country club.

[tptacek]

I think if you do the math on this you're going to find that PACER fees are not really a significant component of the cost of representation. Westlaw/Lexis-Nexis maybe?

[iamnothere]

Fair, I agree that those are a much bigger component. Still, every little reduction in cost probably helps. The cost of education is the real killer but I have no idea how to fix that.

[nickpsecurity]

We should always be allowed to read and know the law we're required to follow. Preferrably for free or easily.

[fireflash38]

It's insane to me that this isn't the default view. How are you supposed to follow the law if you don't know what it is? Putting a price on it just makes it is basically criminalizing being poor.

Which is what we arguably have already considering the state of public defenders, jail, bail system, and how often the rich get off scot free for their crimes.

[manyatoms]

> The problem is - we are all required to abide by the law. And the law is at least partially determined by precedent established by previous court cases. But those cases are behind a paywall.

In 2026, this is similar to having secret laws, as your LLM might not have a subscription or know to tell you to get one

[greyface-]

> straightforwardly regressive

Fiscally? Sure. In terms of liberty? Absolutely not. We are talking about public access to law, which is foundational to a free society.

Federal courts are not strictly limited by tax revenue in the same way that state courts are, and I am more sympathetic to this line of argument on the state level. Finding replacement revenue is a legitimate concern, but a secondary one due to the federal government's deficit spending privilege.

[adampunk]

The problem is threefold: the true marginal cost of a PACER page is closer to 0 than 10 cents; the fixed cost (building an electronic record system) is already paid by the public; and the complication of a price discrimination mechanism would drive up that marginal cost rather than capture true willingness to pay.

This trilemma shows up whenever we try to meter public goods in this fashion. We could, in theory, price public transit or water or what-have-you by evaluating willingness to pay and charging each person that value. However, in practice the invasive monitoring necessary to do so is an enormous burden. We can sort of spread this out with municipal services by (as you noted) replacing trunk lines/pipes with a general fund and asking individuals to pay for the last mile, but that mostly works because the real marginal cost is measurable and not near 0. Further, for utilities, the willingness to pay has good proxies: the end of the last mile is at a real house that isn’t going anywhere. For PACER I doubt that’s the case.

[tptacek]

Again: PACER fees do not simply pay for the marginal cost of delivering a static file.

[adampunk]

Right, but 1: We already pay for the fixed costs and 2: the real marginal cost--however you want to measure it--is still closer to 0 than 10 cents.

[tptacek]

No, it pays for costs unrelated to serving static content. It's a use tax. The fees do not entirely have to do with paying for a website.

[adampunk]

That’s right. And use taxes can and should be calibrated to not just collect money but achieve public policy objectives. If the real marginal cost were close to 10 cents a page, we might be able to argue that funding the system other ways would be more distortionary but it’s not. We have decided with lots of static file services (including Supreme Court opinions) that the right use tax is 0, because zero-cost access is a desirable quality in itself.

[charcircuit]

Hosting files is practically free in 2026. Cost is not a problem here.

[tptacek]

That's not what PACER fees pay for.

[charcircuit]

Being able to upload new files? That's also cheap.

[divbzero]

I agree with the analysis of lead service lines, but serving static files is lot cheaper than replacing underground pipes—so much cheaper that I think it’s qualitatively different.

[cucumber3732842]

At the very least the town could front the water/sewer project with a myriad of financial instruments and then let people pay over time, credit those who didn't need it, etc, etc. That's what they do when they actually give a crap about getting the project done. I seen it with my own eyes when they took everyone off well/septic around here.

Buuuut, that doesn't accomplish the secondary goal of incentivizing the departure of black grandma who has crappy landscaping or car part out guy or whoever else owns their own house and won't be kicked by rent but whose means and standard of living are below the vision of some snooty Chicago suburb. There's always that undertone to these sorts of things.

And if it's not that there's some local business connections that are angling for things to be structured a given way. The dirt work guy with a cousin on the board would much rather see the town force people to incur thousands of $5k jobs that he'll surely get a cut of rather than have to bid a single contract with the same or less profit that he will not necessarily win.

PACER (mostly, of course they don't want to give the public a tour of the sausage factory) isn't juggling 2nd and 3rd tier goals that are so objectionable they can't be talked about like your municipality is.

And frankly I think PACER should be free specifically to enable bulk access so that all sorts of parties can sift through it, present the data, fact check against it, perform meta analysis, etc, etc.

[rootusrootus]

The water line cost should be spread amongst whoever was allowed to vote to make it happen. If non-homeowners were allowed to force homeowners to upgrade, they can help fund it.

[rootusrootus]

Oh my, got a downvote for that. Someone always thinks homeowners are out to spite the world and should be punished for the privilege. Never change, HN, never change.

[rayiner]

Excellent analogy. One note. As a result of a settlement, PACER waives usage fees under $30 per quarter, apparently on the theory that lawyers will rack up more than that while the general public won’t. Doesn’t totally fix the problem but it does move in that direction.

[fireflash38]

I think there are clear benefits to having neighbors and your general community not lead poisoned.

So yeah, I think that cost should be split among the entire municipality.

I find it interesting that you have such a libertarian viewpoint on the one... But not the other. Is this not a direct government monopoly?

[AnthonyMouse]

> But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other

Which is a major difference between that and PACER, since they're serving text and the marginal cost of more people having access to it is essentially zero.

If you make the homeowners pay for the service line replacement, the number of service lines that will be replaced is the same. If you make the public pay for access to the law, this happens:

> Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces.

...because everyone else is priced out by the fees, or even just the friction of having to configure payments for someone who is only going to use it infrequently. Which means the general public loses out on having access to something it would have a negligible marginal cost to give them.

Imagine, for example, an open source project to search or otherwise process court opinions, which then needs access to all of them. If the government is charging per page, that's completely infeasible. If there is a public torrent of all the opinions, people get to do interesting things they currently can't. And this is not just public information but legal precedent that everyone is expected to comply with -- and yet is being charged to even read it.

Also, this isn't right even for the service lines:

> In fact, having the municipality pay for homeowner service line replacement is straightforwardly regressive: it's a subsidy to homeowners, paid in part out of the pockets of people who don't own.

As a minor point, municipalities get their revenue predominantly from property tax, which is collected from property owners.

The main issue is that the outlay is a fixed cost. The cost of replacing the service line will generally be similar for a $200k house as for a $2M house. Meanwhile taxes are collected in proportion to property value or income. If you tax everyone by even a flat X percent in order to give everyone a flat Y dollar amount benefit, the result is a progressive effective rate curve, because everyone gets e.g. a $10,000 benefit but a lower income person is paying $2500 in tax while a higher income person is paying $25,000, making the lower income person's net transfers to the government not just low but negative.