If that is what she wanted, then all they had to do is give her a cost. If they had said this is going to take 30 days, 8 hours a day, to get someone to do it that makes $15 an hour, then your bill would be $3600. Do you want us to go forward? And if it got done quicker, then they charge her less. They could even ask for a deposit of say $1800 and we will call you when that is used up and move on.
I believe, am sure Bob will jump in here, but I believe that the WCTA has an amount of money on deposit with the county and has authorized persons who can make records requests and it be charged against that account. When we run out of money, we would take more. While it would certainly be distressing if one of those individuals were to use up all of those dollars on a very general request, I would rather us deal with it internally, than the county not honor the request.
I understand that a member that made a request was recently told the request had to be written(a violation of the law). The concern I have with that is that we have already spent hundreds of thousands, yet we still have county employees that obviously are still not trained in public records law. That is very exasperating when you think about what all the county has been through.
What about this? When you go to the south Walton annex planning/zoning they ask you to sign in. But if you are there to make a public records request, it has been held that it is illegal to ask the person making the request to identify themselves. A few years back the DEP official in Pensacola that was requiring ID for people seeking records was arrested for the violation.
So here we have a policy in place that could actual result in somebody being incarcerated, but still it has not changed as far as I know.