Honesty and Transparency just got more Expensive

The new costs for public information will only affect 5% of the people says Staff.

I believe that public information should be relatively cost free, accessible and easy. We already pay the salaries of city employees. Why should Lake Worth citizens pay again for them to do their job? We have always paid for the price to copy the document which has been 15 cents a page for a long time. Now they want us to pay for research time that will involve the employee’s salary and benefits. The public will be charged after the first hour and it will be itemized. This opens up a whole new can of worms for abuse. Filling public information is part of just being a government employee. We have an employee in the Clerk’s office whose job description entails public information requests. So what’s the big deal here?

What it boils down to is that Staff, whose salaries we pay, is irritated in just doing this bothersome job. The Public is a nuisance in their minds, the very people for whom they serve. It is an imposition on their valuable time. They would much prefer filing or going to the dentist.

The harder the City makes it for the citizenry to access public information and the more costly it is to obtain will definitely slow down the entire process and the transparency goal. The Clerk says that this will not affect 95-96% of the requests. I can well understand someone coming in and asking for any document that ever existed so that he can build a law suit against the City and I don’t have a problem with charging more for a commercial request. The City Manager said a few weeks ago that she didn’t know how to distinguish what was commercial and what wasn’t. Well, the Federal government makes the distinction so why can't we?

I feel that this new policy could be abused and that Staff could punish a citizen for whom it does not like and charge accordingly. All of a sudden that e-mail request comes across their desk and they say, "Oh no, not him again." You can see how quickly that employee might get the request filled. Something normally that should take 2 minutes to download from a computer might end up taking two days of staff time. Also, I think that it is Staff’s obligation to tell the citizen if the document can be found on-line and where they can find it.

Staff should be there to be helpful to the public, not the reverse. If it is a document that can be sent in a .pdf file format, they should offer that free of charge. Wayne Marcinkoski made a good point--what if staff gives you the WRONG information, do you then still have to pay? Wayne requested information on the investigative findings pertaining to the breach at the utility and was told there was none.

On a side note--

This entire matter with the Utility should have been handled in the very beginning and an investigation done immediately…all in writing and in the Sunshine. Why should we have to pay just to see if this was done? It is OUR Utility and we have the right to know if an investigation ever was requested and the results of same.

Why the silence? Why the cover-up? Why was someone fired? Why are two employees on administrative leave? Why not everyone involved in this matter then?

To get back to the point--We know, and the Press knows, that the city is slow to fulfill public information requests on many matters often times telling you the document does not exist. The other ploy is if you don’t request it in just the correct wordage or document name, forget about ever getting it. You might call it an Ordinance on the beach when in fact it is referred to as an Amendment. Staff likes to play games at times. They get some perverse kick out of your ignorance.

The truth of the matter is that public information is now going to be more costly and therefore for that reason alone, will stifle freedom of information. No one on the dais seems to have a problem with this other than Commissioner Jennings who voted against it on the Ordinance's Second Reading. The Palm Beach Post could understand the potential for abuse and were the ones who suggested increasing the original 30 minutes to 60 minutes to when the clock starts ticking. They understood it. The Herald didn't. Our Commission went along with the City Manager.

These public information requests are what keep our government honest and by making it more expensive, that honesty now has a price on it that is subjective and could very possibly be abused. It could very likely put a damper on requests in general. It was right that the public bring up its concerns on this. The City Manager has the majority of the Commission, as well as our local news Editor, convinced that making it more expensive is justified and that most of us will not be affected. You have to wonder what’s in it for them to capitulate?

So the price of freedom of information just got a little less free. As we attempt to have affordable healthcare, affordable housing and affordable everything else, we can only hope that this latest decision will not stifle the process or end up indirectly putting a "gag" on public information.