Groups ask high court to bar ‘exorbitant’ fees for government documents – Maryland Matters

Annoyed by the rising price of acquiring authorities paperwork, three public curiosity teams have turned to the state’s highest courtroom for aid. 

The organizations need the Courtroom of Appeals to interpret state legislation in a fashion that might make most authorities paperwork obtainable to the general public freed from cost. And in circumstances the place charges are warranted, the teams say it’s time state and native governments stopped charging “exorbitant” charges. 

The teams — the ACLU of Maryland, the Baltimore-based Public Justice Heart and the Washington Legal professionals’ Committee — filed their petition with the Courtroom of Appeals earlier this month. Their plea got here within the type of an amicus transient filed in help of the appellants in Baltimore Metropolis Police Division, et al. v. Open Justice Baltimore, a civil rights group. 

The teams’ lawyer famous that the Normal Meeting has instructed state and native companies that they need to waive doc charges when doing so “can be within the public curiosity.” Regardless of that order, the general public has seen “a disturbing sample” emerge in recent times. 

“[A]gencies are more and more demanding that public curiosity organizations like [the petitioners] pay 1000’s and even tons of of 1000’s of {dollars} to entry data concerning the operations and actions of the federal government,” the teams wrote. 

The flexibility of people and teams to carry governments accountable for his or her actions “begins to crumble if authorities companies are permitted to erect barrier after barrier when nonprofit public curiosity organizations… search entry to public data in furtherance of their missions,” they added.

The teams pointed to at least one case, ACLU of Maryland v. Sheriff of Calvert County, by which the plaintiff was charged greater than $12,000 for data of strip searches and physique cavity searches.

The ACLU of Maryland has challenged that price demand and the case is pending, their lawyer stated.

Maryland’s open entry to paperwork legislation, the Public Info Act, was adopted in 1970. It was modeled after the federal Freedom of Info Act, which took impact in 1967. The state’s legislation was amended in 1982 to permit companies to impose heftier charges in circumstances the place firms had been utilizing PIA inquiries to ferret out details about rivals. 

In most cases, public curiosity teams (and information organizations) routinely ask that doc charges be waived, invoking the “public curiosity” clause to again their request.

The three teams petitioning the appeals courtroom pointed to federal companies, which they stated “hardly ever cost charges.” FOIA actions are lined by charges lower than 0.4% of the time, they stated. And when charges are imposed, “any such prices are virtually completely restricted to prices— corresponding to photocopy prices, at low per-page charges. The place they do cost search or assessment charges, they’re virtually all the time restricted to business enterprise requesters.”

The excessive compliance price “means federal companies acknowledge that a part of their job is to supply public data when FOIA requires,” petitioners claimed. 

Maryland companies, nonetheless, have a extra blended file, in response to an evaluation carried out by the state legal professional common in 2019. 

Though some companies — the Departments of Commerce, Juvenile Providers and Schooling — granted the entire waiver requests they acquired, the Division of Pure Sources “didn’t grant any” of the waiver requests it acquired. Eight of the 13 companies that acquired waiver requests granted at the very least half of them. 

The notable exceptions, the AG’s workplace discovered, had been the 2 companies with the most important caseloads, the Division of the Setting and the Maryland State Police. They “granted a comparatively small proportion of their waiver requests— 4% and 10%, respectively.”