Maine town tries to charge MuckRock $750 for opening an email | Hacker News Reader

Maine town tries to charge MuckRock $750 for opening an email

muckrock.com

29 pointsdanso16 comments

> We won’t be paying the $750 because according to the Maine Freedom of Access Act, if the cost to fulfill the request exceeds $30, the requester must be notified in advance.

In the US, when you ask a government for documents, they can charge you a fee determined by formulas in various laws, usually $x per researcher hour, to track down said document and send it to you. If the estimated cost exceeds $y, they have to ask your permission first. $750 sounds wildly unreasonable for a PDF that I'm sure every administrative employee in this small town already had in their inbox, but then I'm not familiar with the Maine law.

The title should be: "We made a FOIA-like request and the town made a bureaucratic error wrt billing", but that generates fewer clicks.

The law is different for every state and for the federal government. Fees are allowed for requests, but they can be challenged if exorbitant. Which is what requesters do, and which is why governments aren't nickel-and-diming you for every type of request, nor do they automatically resort to a large fee as a deterrent.

The Maine law states this:

> A person may inspect or copy any public record in the office of the agency or official during reasonable office hours. The agency or official shall mail the copy upon request. The agency may charge a reasonable fee to cover the cost of making the copies for you, as well as actual mailing costs. 1 M.R.S. § 408-A(1), (2), (8)(E)

http://www.maine.gov/foaa/faq/

States have even less defense if there is no print out or delivery cost on their end.

In any case, your criticism about the headline is unwarranted. The article clearly states the issue: that the government is not allowed to assess a fee before fulfilling the request.

The content of the agency's reply does not suggest a "bureaucratic error". They explicitly state their reasoning and the conditions of assessing the fee. This would indicate willful action on their part to deter their responsibility to the law, so the headline accurately sums up the situation. And the OP also links to their research on the Maine law that finds the fee to be $15/hour:

https://www.muckrock.com/place/united-states-of-america/main...

edit: * Maine; added reference to the content of the response

My husband FOIA's every day it seems, and sometimes he pays fees. I think it's perfectly reasonable for a government to charge a modest fee for research, retrieval, printing, etc. Otherwise you might get trolls FOIA'ing huge amounts of stuff just because they can.

Many public records laws do allow for a fee, or at least a delay if the search requires extensive work. However, the counter-argument is that if fees go unchallenged, they not only become a defense against following the public records law, they reduce incentive for the government to actively be more efficient in disseminating records. There'd be much less incentive for a government to publish online if they were able to charge for any kind of work.

In this case, $750 to email a PDF is not at all a reasonable request.

Is the fee for opening the email or the attachment? If the email says opening the attachment incurs a fee, does that constitute advance notice?

You can't send an envelope through the USPS with two letters, the first saying that if you read the second you owe them $750.

I'm sure Muckrock has a larger legal force than a city of 20,000 in Maine.

Unsolicited? No. But if I ask you to send me the letter, things can be different.

Consider if the attachment were a password protected zip, password "iagreetopay". Does opening the zip indicate consent?

It doesn't unless there is an agreed upon contract.

So in one world, Maine emails back "that report costs $750. Agree or disagree?" If you agree, you mail them a check, and two weeks later they process the payment and send the report. Apparently that's ok.

But it's kind of slow and tedious. They can expedite the process by just including the report. Open if you agree. Delete if you don't. Or even defer the decision until later, but there's an "instant unlock" option available at any time. That seems a lot better than the above alternative.

Maybe Maine flubbed the implementation, but it seems like a "for your consideration upon agreement" facility should exist that doesn't require multiple round trips. Certainly more convenient than the alternative.

I would argue that $750 to email a copy of a proposal is not "reasonable." I don't see anywhere in the statue that allows for payment of legal fees:

http://www.maine.gov/foaa/faq/index.shtml

This is all irrelevant if they sent the information before agreeing on payment terms.

While some jurisdictions have been able to block data requests on the argument that they contain private intellectual property -- the case that comes to mind is Ohio, which won a case against providing map data because somehow the ArcGIS software used to create/save the map was inextricable (yes, it's as absurd as it sounds -- this doesn't seem to be the case here.

According to MuckRock, Maine allows for fees of $15/hour for search and copying time. If they demanded $750 before sending the file or making it otherwise accessible, MuckRock could challenge them to provide the record showing 50 hours of billable work.

As they say - any publicity is good publicity. Anyone talking Amazon proposal will now also discuss this stunt from Brunswick.

Wow. I don't know whether to classify this as beaurocratic incompetence, bloat, or malice.

If it's any consolation, Brunswick probably wont win the bid. Amazon will probably pick a much larger city in the Eastern US that has a healthier/larger talent pool.

Brunswick does have a lot of cheap land - at least by urban standards, and it's a stone's throw from Portland. I haven't been following the news back home, but I've got to imagine that this involved the old Brunswick Naval Air Station location. They've been trying to follow the model Portsmouth is charting with the now-closed Pease Air Force Base, but with less success.

Up here, we still consider Brunswick to be Northern Massachusetts.

Why does that matter? Nowhere in what my neighbors consider Maine actually wants Amazon. But, BNAS might be a brilliant location for it.

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