In the category of "don't let this happen to you," this article from Knox County, Tennessee (happily not Kentucky) describes inconsistent practices in that state with regard to imposing fees for inspection of public records that have landed one local official in the courts.
Tennessee's open records law is clear on the point, according to Deborah Fisher, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government. Tennessee's public agencies cannot charge citizens who only wish to inspect records.
This is true even if the agency must incur costs in redacting protected information — such as a social security numbers — from the record by making a copy, marking thru the SSN, and making a second copy to ensure the SSN doesn't "bleed through."
In Tennessee, as in Kentucky, the agency can only charge for one copy since redaction is a statutory duty and the agency must bear the costs.
But the article suggests that there is no consistent practice among state and local agencies In Tennessee.
In the case now in Tennessee's courts, a local sheriff indicated he would charge a requester $25 per hour to inspect records to cover his staff costs.
Kentucky has forbidden this practice in a line of cases almost as old as the law itself.
Our law permits an agency to recover a "reasonable fee" based on its actual costs, *not including staff costs*, for making copies of records on request.
But a citizen has the absolute right to inspect records at no cost — again, even if the agency incurred actual or staff costs associated with redacting those records — and cannot be required to accept and pay for copies, in lieu of inspection, if he or she asserts the right to inspect.
In addition, a Kentucky citizen has the right to make copies of records as he or she inspects them — using a camera phone or portable scanner — unless the citizen is inspecting records in the county clerk's office.
County clerks secured passage of a bill several years ago that authorizes them to charge up to fifty cents per page — as opposed to the standard ten cents per page — for copies of records obtained under the open records law. That law also permits county clerks to restrict the use of personnel devices to make copies.
Unless an agency can prove that a citizen's reproduction of a public record will damage the record, there are no other restrictions on making personal copies with private devices.
These are firmly entrenched principles supported by clear statutory language and decisions of the attorney general.
Any Kentucky agency that deviates from them exposes itself to the very real threat of a successful legal challenge that is apt to cost a lot more than the amount it would otherwise "lose" in permitting free inspection of public records as required by law.
