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:
So, they want to charge us for them to do the job we already pay for through taxes? OK, that’s fine, then lower the taxes we pay to compensate…
Right he removed ALL doubt for sure! He opened his mouth. The only time he should do that is to eat at Mickeys.
YES he wanted to brawl with Max at the videoed council meeting. Loser. Police had to intervine.
Duties my licked finger, Duties as a city employee or council member or any government employee are there for one thing….WE THE PEOPLE. Be it questions about your trash to ordinances to the temperature they are getting paid to ANSWER it! Public servants period. I’ve heard his dumb ass ask questions to his own council, Hick let’s charge you for that! WOW
Travis, it is better to be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
I believe the point Mr. Hickey should have made is that fulfilling all these requests for information may lead to needing another employee at City Hall, thus increasing the budgetary needs to run the department. Doing research for the public is not free. Yes, the employees are there to serve us, but they all have other assigned duties that they must let slide in order to do research. If they are tied up doing research for hours, their other work doesn’t get done and soon another employee is needed. When that happens because of all the research, the money is not in the budget to hire another employee, so the only source for wages would be research fees. I think the entire issue comes down to funding another full-time or part-time employee to do the research, not just soaking people who want information. I don’t think ALL the taxpayers should have to foot the bill for the few who want volumes of information or data from public offices.
Peter, I agree with you. Most businesses and public offices only hire enough people to do the job at hand. When employees are tied up doing research for outside sources, it is difficult to complete all the daily work. This happened to me when I worked in a business and had to compile records for a customer’s court case. Then the judge refused to compensate our business for all the hours of research I did and all the copies we made, even though we were told we would be paid. We were short-handed during the time I had to put into the research and we couldn’t hire a temp to replace my position or to do the research. I feel a one-hour “mulligan” per year is appropriate and beyond that, all research done by a city employee should be paid research. It would be great if all the records were computerized so the public could do its own research without handling the records. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with Joe Blow handling public records without a search before and after using the viewing library. Remember Clinton’s crony who stuffed records down his pants? I think a city employee needs to do the research until it is computerized. I think hiring someone to computerize all past and future city and county records, with hardened protection for the server, would be a great progressive idea.