John Q. Public’s quest for records can be a costly challenge

 On July 1, 2015 @ 4:00 am

The public needs to cough up some serious coin if it wants to know about the history of McKinney police officer Eric Casebolt.

Online news service Gawker was to ^[1]ld it would cost $79,229.09 ^[1] to obtain emails regarding Casebolt’s 10 years with the department.

Casebolt is the officer who accosted a group of kids at a pool party in the Dallas suburb in response to a complaint. He was seen on a video at the scene wrestling a bikini-clad teen girl to the ground and pulling his service weapon. He resigned after the video went viral and McKinney Police Chief Greg Conley said the officer’s actions were “indefensible.”

His resignation prompts the obvious questions of past performance and if Casebolt had a history of overreaction.

Gawker’s public records request would entail, in part, “programming or the manipulation of data” that will result in “interference with the city’s ongoing operations…” according to a letter to Gawker from Lisa Mares, an associate at the Brown & Hofmeister law firm in Richardson, representing the city of McKinney.

According to a Gawker account:

The city arrived at that extraordinary figure after estimating that hiring a programmer to execute the grueling and complex task of searching through old emails would cost $28.50 per hour, and that the search for emails about Casebolt would take 2,231 hours of said programmer’s time. That only comes to about $63,000; the bill also includes $14,726 “to cover the actual time a computer resource takes to execute a particular program.” In other words, the operating cost of the computer used to search the emails is nearly 15 grand on its own. Another portion of Gawker’s request, for copies of Casebolt’s personnel file and any internal investigations into his conduct, costs $255.04.

The public often seeks correspondence between public officials and the costs are frequently used as both a “shield and a sword,” said Tom Gregor, an open records lawyer in Houston.

“There are some legitimate responses regarding cost,” Gregor said. “I’ve also seen the other side where it should be something ridiculously simple and the cost comes back at $80,000. It’s where the estimate is cost prohibitive and it appears the goal is to cut (the requestor) off.”

Among the highest estimates handed out in recent memory is the $122,602 estimate sent to Chuck Ross by the Tarrant Regional Water District in October.

Ross, a reporter for the Daily Caller, asked for emails from the agency’s financial officer, Sandy Newby. His request specified search terms and email domain names under which to search.

After the six-figure price tag, he was urged by the agency to narrow the request. Ross said he refined it and the price went up. He opted out of the records.

The six-figure estimate is the second highest ever heard by Joe Larsen, a First Amendment lawyer.