As the 69th Montana Legislature gears up to meet this winter, lawmakers are spending time thinking about policies they believe will make the state better. The Montana Transparency Project believes one straightforward option is a law standardizing fees for Right-to-Know requests.
While we’ve been assisting Montanans with information requests this year, we’ve heard time and again from folks confused and concerned about how much and when they’ll have to pay for their public information request. Frustratingly, many of these Montanans have abandoned their requests when presented with a bill for information they haven’t even seen yet. Despite our best efforts, it’s difficult to provide advice on lowering costs or to opine on whether a fee is reasonable when there is so much variance in the way Montana agencies charge citizens seeking public information.
By law, state agencies are allowed to charge a requester for the cost of fulfilling a public information request. The fee can’t exceed the “actual costs” of fulfilling the request, and each fee has to be documented. The fee may include the time spent gathering the information (a provision reflected in most agencies’ practice of charging the requesting party the actual hourly rate of the employee completing the request). But it’s not just the cost of paper or the time spent sifting through filing cabinets that agencies can bill for; right to know fees can even include the time the state spends thinking about how much time it will take to complete the request. Agencies often require upfront payment of a fee estimate before starting to work on the request.
