Photo/Federal Drug Administration
State law stipulates how public records custodians can charge for requested documents and information that require staff time to assemble and/or redact if those records include confidential components.
Virginia Mercury Photo/Ned Oliver
âIf we are going to have a bias . . . it should be that we err on the side of acknowledging that public documents are public,â Del. Danica Roem says. âAs opposed to the hassle, time and cost to government.â The idea there is if youâre going to give people carte blanche to make local government turn over documents, theyâre going to use that tool inappropriately.
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May 19, 2021
For Minor to see what had happened, the school system wanted her to pay $2,500, down from an initial estimate of $8,800 for the video and staff emails, to cover its costs of producing the video and redacting it to blur out other students.
Subscribe I could get an intern at George Mason University to do it for 10 bucks, Roem, a former journalist and Democrat from Manassas who has made FOIA reform a priority issue, told the Virginia FOIA Advisory Council s records subcommittee Tuesday.
To reduce the chances of others facing prohibitively expensive FOIA fees while seeking access to government records, Roem has introduced legislation requiring public bodies in Virginia to fulfill records requests for free as long as they take no more than two hours of staff time. For more complex requests that take longer, public bodies could only charge the hourly rate of the lowest-paid employee working on the request or $33 an hour, whichever is lower. To try to prevent overw