Paige St. John didn’t give up.
She spent three years of her life searching in the dark for a hidden behemoth. There were mornings when she crawled out of bed and went straight to her laptop. She snuck away moments while her father passed away, while her daughter turned 15 years old. Some nights she sat awake in bed and wondered what she was doing.
But she kept working.
Earlier this year, St. John was awarded for her efforts with the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism.
Years of reporting, scouring databases (and creating her own), unearthing anonymous sources and international travel lead to a series of stories published in the Herald-Tribune that exposed Florida’s insurance industry as a haven for speculators that have exploited crises for their own gains.
Key to her investigation: public records.
Florida’s open government legislation, known as the Government in the Sunshine Law, is one of the most expansive freedom of information laws in the United States. The law says, “…all state, county, and municipal records shall at all times be open for a personal inspection by any person.”
The law specifically defines public records as all “documents, papers, letters, maps, books, tapes, photographs, films, sound recordings, data processing software, or other material, regardless of physical form, characteristics or means of transmission, made or received pursuant to law or ordinance or in connection with the transaction of official business by any agency.”
For those records and the time required to obtain them, a government agency may “charge a reasonable fee for the extensive use of agency resources—personnel, information technology, or both.”
But what constitutes a “reasonable fee?”
In last week’s issue of The Crow’s Nest, an article called “Public records generate financial hurdle for The Crow’s Nest” explained that USF St. Petersburg was asking for $552 for a weeklong period of public records regarding Residence Hall One. The estimate includes four hours of work at two computers at a cost of $60 per hour for each computer.
Requests by The Crow’s Nest to obtain access to the records to make its own copies were denied due to privacy in education guidelines.
A request for documents related to the purchase of the old Dali Museum, now Harbor Hall, returned a public records charge document estimating the cost to receive the records at $394.52.
Newspapers often pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for public records. In one well-documented case, the Herald-Tribune was charged $800 for public records about a 911 operator who was fired after fumbling an emergency call. However, The Crow’s Nest’s budget—funded through Activities and Services fees allocations and advertising—limits its ability to pay $552 for public records.
While major news organizations with steady subscribers and advertisers can afford to pay for these records, the public might not. Are public records really open to the public at the cost of several hundred dollars or more? All citizens, regardless of income, should have fair access to public records, or else they should not be called “public” records.
The school says that the cost arises from the hours of labor necessary to locate the records and ensure they meet educational privacy standards. But since USFSP is a public institution, these records should already be organized in a way that can be easily accessed by the public. Or else, why bother having public institutions if they behave like they are private?
In Florida, it seems that though the sunshine is free and open to the public, the records made available under the Government in the Sunshine Law are not.
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