Wisconsin Examiner sues Black River Falls over records costs
A courtroom and a judge's gavel. (Getty Images creative)
The Wisconsin Examiner has filed a lawsuit against the city of Black River Falls over the costs quoted for fulfilling an open records request for the emails of city and police officials. The lawsuit was filed last Wednesday in Jackson County Circuit Court.
The records, sought as part of an Examiner investigation into the city’s response to reports of a missing indigenous man and handling of the subsequent investigation after he was found dead, were requested in March. The request included email communications from the city’s mayor, attorney and police department after September 2022.
In response, the city said it would cost $4,400, plus $225 per hour spent reviewing the city attorney’s emails, to complete the request, stating that the cost was because the city uses a third party company, Tech Pros, to store its email archives.
The city also told the Examiner it has no contract, written agreement or memorandum of understanding with Tech Pros for outsourcing storage of the archive. In emails obtained by the Examiner between Tech Pros and city staff, the company told officials that in order to complete the search for emails, the company would need to purchase 10 “Microsoft Purview E-Discovery Licenses” at $144 apiece and it would spend 20 hours on the request, billed at $150/hr.
After multiple amendments narrowing the initial request in attempts to bring down the cost, the quoted price to obtain the records was $1,200 plus $450 for searching the city attorney’s emails.
In the lawsuit, the Examiner’s attorney Tom Kamenick, president of the Wisconsin Transparency Project, argues that state law only allows governments to charge for the direct costs of searching for records and passing along the cost to have an outside party conduct that search is not “direct.”
“Charging an unlawful fee is effectively a denial of a request for records,” the lawsuit states. “Under [state statute], an authority is allowed to ‘impose a fee upon a requester for locating a record, not exceeding the actual, necessary and direct cost of location, if the cost is $50 or more.”
“The City has chosen a method of storage of its email records that is needlessly burdensome and expensive to use,” the suit continues. “It is not ‘necessary’ for the City to utilize such a burdensome and expensive method of storing its records. The fees the City is attempting to charge are those imposed by Tech Pros and are therefore not ‘direct’ costs, but rather are indirect costs.”
