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Did you want fries with that? Travis Hickey wants to charge citizens when they ask City Hall a question (VIDEO)

Freedom of Information could soon be optional at City Hall
Freedom of Information could soon be optional at City Hall

MASON CITY – The Mason City Council moved ahead with plans to authorize City Administrator Brent Trout to charge the public a fee for asking City Hall for information, sometimes called a “freedom of information” request.

Mr. Trout wants to charge for many of the requests that City staff now commonly perform at no fee.  He also wants to publish the requests to the City’s website.

Mr. Trout says he got the idea of charging the public for information requests at a seminar.  It seems Mr. Trout gets a lot of his ideas at seminars, as he did two years ago when he attended a “workshop” that supposedly gave advice on “handling comments” and “unfair statements” from the public posted to “new media” websites.

“I found it very interesting,” Mr. Trout wrote in a memo at the time, “and something that all public officials should be aware of.”

Most of the City Council had varying degrees of acceptance of Trout’s proposal to charge for information, with At-Large Councilman Alex Kuhn voicing the most opposition.

“The citizens are my boss,” Mr. Kuhn said Tuesday, “and I feel it is very important to have open and transparent access to the government.”

Second Ward Councilman Travis Hickey backed the idea 100%, comparing City Hall business to a McDonald’s.

“I’m in favor with chargin’ everybody,” Mr. Hickey stated.

He also said that would provide the “average citizen” a “mulligan” if they ask one question a year.

In Clear Lake, City Administrator Scott Flory said no such policy is in place.

“Generally speaking, we rarely have run into a situation where we have had to charge anyone,” Mr. Flory said.  “Any interested person can look at documents at the City office for no cost and if they only want a few copies we do not charge for that service.  If it was more burdensome and was going to amount to a significant amount of staff time and copying, we would charge only for our actual costs.  ”

Watch the following video for Mr. Hickey’s thoughts on the matter:

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