Email Fight: Perry Demands $2K Per Month
November 26th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
A previous post described the open records battle being waged by Milwaukee software professional John Washburn versus the governor of this great state, Rick Perry.
Mr. Washburn’s requests would not have been possible without Elise Hu’s blog series, The Purge — which set about investigating the public records retention policies of Texas government agencies. She and Jay Root with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram deserve credit in terms of finding and following this story.
Washburn has now been sent a bill by Perry that estimates the cost of “locating, compiling, and reproducing” four days’ worth of emails to be $568. There’s a warning about redaction costs as well. And, once again, Perry’s office suggested narrowing Mr. Washburn’s public records request.
At that rate, Washburn could be looking at an open records request fee total of more than $2,000 per month — and Perry’s office also noted that a failure to receive the funds would result in automatic withdrawals of outstanding requests, along with a note that no disclosure of the records requested would begin until the governor’s office receives a “deposit.”
What was Washburn’s reaction?
“I laughed at it, to be honest with you,” he says. “It is exorbitantly high.”
Washburn says he knows exactly what he asked for, and he knows that it can be easily obtained.
“How hard can email extraction be from a server?” he asked. (I must admit thinking about that for a minute. Perry’s office is claiming 31.5 hours of staff time at $15 per hour, which results in the bulk of the $568 figure. What will those staff members be doing during those hours? We called Perry’s office and they said they’d get back to us with more details.)
Washburn asked for the emails in their original, digital format. There is a question as to how such documents can be redacted, and for that matter, what is the logic of the redactors?
Washburn, who has a history of open records activity in Wisconsin, Florida, and now Texas, says he has never before encountered a charge for staff time, although it is standard in the Lone Star state.
He did tell me that he was surprised by what he called Perry’s ‘gambit.’ He said he thought Perry would take the ‘drag-it-out’ approach to stifling records requests.
“Before, I thought it was just going to be stretched out,” Washburn says. “Now, they’re hoping that I won’t come up with the money.”
So far, Washburn has requested the governor’s emails from preceding days on Nov. 6, 9, 13, 20, and 23. The objective, Washburn said, was to stop a pro-forma email destruction policy that Perry’s office had in place — and which it said it inherited from Governor George W. Bush.
Washburn does have a plan to thwart Perry’s latest move, but it will take another post to assess its merits.
November 26th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
[…] that dude in Wisconsin independently wealthy? He better be, or apparently he won’t be looking at any e-mails from the Texas governor. “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.” - Steve Martin […]
February 11th, 2008 at 12:22 am
[…] a little background: Perry’s office sent Washburn a bill of $568 for staff time and compliance costs for each three-to-four-day batch of emails. Washburn has managed to pay for only one batch so far. […]