Editorial: Exorbitant fee limits public records access
From Sunshine Review
December 18, 2008
[edit] Editorial: Exorbitant fee limits public records access
"Vermont may be the last strong hold of participatory democracy, but Montpelier keeps proving that it understands little when it comes to open government.
The latest transgression is a scheme to charge Vermonters -- and charge them dearly -- to access criminal conviction records online, a proverbial case of one step forward, two steps back. The whole idea of easy access to a public record is marred by the charge of $20 per request, a fee that's scheduled to go up to $30 on July 1.
There is no way to justify charging $30 or even $20 on the basis of how much it costs to retrieve information from an existing electronic database. The fee is nothing more than a tax, and the fee bump on July 1 is a tax increase. What other tax do they plan to raise by 50 percent?"
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