Oftentimes the reason that no response has been made is some agency trepidation at estimating the costs involved . This should not be the case . There are a number of ways to estimate the cost of production which in short , involve estimating the time that will be spent by the lowest paid employee that can fill the request , and excluding the first fifteen minutes , and copying charges . One can have set charges for certain things such as video recording and digital documents such as CDs , DVDs , video tapes , and thumb drives , but those must be the actual costs of those digital storage devices . There can be an additional flat fee of $ 10 for dashcam and bodycam videos . The Act only requires good faith estimates of the time for production and the cost .
One other matter to note on Open Records Requests in general . When I have conducted training on litigation issues for public officials , I had a Power- Point slide to encourage officers and employees to treat certain notices as “ hot potatoes ” to emphasize those matters must be acted upon as quickly as possible . Those were service of lawsuits upon their agency , ante litem notices of legal claims , and open records requests . It was and is my recommendation that these documents be immediately forwarded to the City Attorney or to the local government attorney and manager as soon as possible for their information and handling . An open records request requires prompt action by the agency to fill it , but many such requests have serious but not apparent motivations such as to discover information which will later be used to file a lawsuit , and this makes the attorney and manager aware that additional investigation of the subject may be advisable immediately .
There is another major issue that often arises concerning documents , chiefly texts , emails and posts from social sharing programs such as Instagram , Snapchat and Facebook , which are located in personal , privately-owned cell phones or personal computers of agency employees . Personal ownership notwithstanding , it is the content of the text or email that determines if it is a public record and not who owns the device . If the message received or sent or posted concerns public business of the agency , it is generally a public record and must be produced .
Employees who use such equipment , whether personal devices or those owned by the agency , should be made aware of both sides of this coin – conducting public business on a personal device , and personal business on the agency-owned device . Notwithstanding the presence of personal communications on the agency-owned device , the requestor can ask for all texts , emails , voicemails , photographs , etc . on that phone or computer , which may include the personal communications . Also problematic in the law enforcement context are telephone numbers , dates and times of calls and the duration of those calls . These might disclose confidential informants or information or elements of an ongoing investigation which would be exempt from disclosure . There must be a careful review to redact information that would be subject to an exemption . There is a need to be well trained on these issues . Moreover , if such public records are simply deleted , that may well not be proper under the appropriate local or state record retention provisions discussed herein .
There was a recent case where a citizen requested the agency-owned cell phone records for an employee which contained revealing photos which a female friend had sent to his agency -owned phone . The phone records , including the photos , were
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