Fees

The Michigan Department of State Police is charging the Mackinac Center for Public Policy nearly $7 million to fulfill its FOIA request for information on how the state has used homeland security grant money since 2002, the nonpartisan research group reported.

Santa Clara County must pay a nonprofit watchdog group $500,000 to cover its legal fees after a three-year dispute over whether the county could withhold or charge extremely high fees for electronic maps that were sought during a public records request, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

A bill introduced in California’s legislature would allow state agencies to stop filling the open-records requests of people who have asked for records too many times.

The bill sets out a process for an agency to seek a court order allowing them to no longer process records requests when the requester has an “improper purpose, which includes, but is not limited to, the harassment of a public agency or its employees.”

The federal Bureau of Prisons was ordered by a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to either look again for records requested by a legal magazine under the Freedom of Information Act, or prove that its initial search was done properly.

A federal appeals court awarded a Freedom of Information Act requester attorney fees Friday, issuing its second opinion in the same case that rebuked the lower court.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. decided FOIA requester William Davy deserved to have his attorney's fees paid after six years of litigation against the CIA. Davy sought records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Despite having enough cash to increase its spending budget to $11 billion, Alaska is offering few cut rates to those requesting public records,The Associated Press reported. 

Although the state will on occasion waive fees for less than 200 pages of copied material or if the information requested is considered a matter of public interest, Alaska's senior assistant attorney general told The AP that times were changing.

Commercial photographers are being charged $500 for a permit to take pictures of buildings in a small, historic town in Northern Alabama.

Photographer Don Broome said he was served with a violation notice two weeks ago and was told to leave the town of Mooresville, Ala., because he didn’t buy the permit before taking pictures. The town has a mere 60 residents and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The Advocate [Baton Rouge] must pay more than $200,000 to receive documents it requested related to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s post-hurricane contracts, according to the agency.

FEMA said it would only provide the records if the newspaper pays the fee. The approximately $209,990 is what FEMA determined it would cost to research and compile the more than two million documents that the agency deemed The Advocate is asking for in its request.

In Vermont last week, the Senate Government Operations Committee approved a bill setting up a  new committee to examine the list of over 207 exemptions to Vermont’s public records law. The proposed committee would also look into the different charges for accessing public records.