That’s the only reason I can think of that Gov. Mark Sanford’s office would charge nearly $1,200 for four days of e-mail records requested by the Sunshine Blogger Project under the Freedom of Information Act. Unless, of course, they had something to hide. But seriously, what are the chances Sanford and company would try to hide something? Puh-lease.
Apparently what happened was Tim Kelly with the aforementioned Sunshine Blogger Project generated a request using this tool for “all governmental e-mail (electronic mail) received by the Office of the Governor of South Carolina for the four (4) day period beginning on or after 12:00 am (midnight) Friday, February1, 2008 and ending before 12:00 a.m. (midnight) Tuesday, February 5, 2008.” He got the following reply a few days later from Sanford’s spokesman Joel Sawyer:
[W]e estimate the response cost will be at least $1169.88. If you wish us to proceed with your FOIA request as submitted, please a submit a deposit of $1169.88. We will not begin to gather documents until the deposit is received. Please understand that this deposit is based upon an estimate.Upon final completion of the response, and when actual time and costs can be accurately determined and quantified, you will be required to pay the difference, if any, between the deposit amount and the actual cost figure.
If you wish for us to proceed with your February 8, 2008, Freedom of Information request as submitted, please remit to this office a check in the amount of $1169.88.
Enough with the damn deposit already. We get it. You want an absurd amount of loot for almost no work and absolutely no overhead fees and you want the money up front. Point taken.
As I oh-so-subtly alluded to in the headline and first sentence, unless the Governor’s Office is flat broke, I’m not really sure why they would charge such an outrageous price for NOTHING. Let’s see, $100 to pay some over-priced tech guy for 15 minutes of copying and pasting old e-mails into a file and e-mailing it to Mr. Kelly. Are there any other “estimated costs” I’m missing here?
And if this “response cost” is “based on an estimate,” I want to know what the hell that “estimate” is. Seriously… who “estimates” $1,169.88? One thousand dollars is an estimate, $1,169.88 is NOT an estimate. What did they do, throw darts at six numbers as they scrolled by on Sanford’s spending clock?
But perhaps the best part of this whole scam is a little note Mr. Kelly made at the end of his post:
With four 91-day periods in a year, it would cost $101,738 to review a year’s worthof email in the governor’s office.
Hmm… I think I know someone who could come up with almost EXACTLY that amount of money. His name? Mark Sanford. If you remember back to last year, the governor wrote himself a nice little check from the public coffer totaling $101,524. That’s just too weird.
(h/t Open Records)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Executive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Standard Sanford hypocrisy …he preaches transparency and accountability…for everyone else. When will people begin to understand that Mark Sanford TRULY believes he is better than us, and follows a different set of rules?
Sanford’s administration ALWAYS hides information, even as they demand it from others.
Standard Sanford hypocrisy …he preaches transparency and accountability…for everyone else. When will people begin to understand that Mark Sanford TRULY believes he is better than us, and follows a different set of rules?
Sanford’s administration ALWAYS hides information, even as they demand it from others.
Hey, Mr. Fogel,
Your blog went blue, and very hard toread. is it you…or me?
This is unacceptable. Those are public records and as such can’t be sold by a government entity. When the charge exceeds the cost the excess is profit. Work a government employee does while on the government payroll is already funded by that same public that owns those records. Hence, I smell obstruction of justice by imposing an unattainable price to a right guaranteed under FOIA. I do know the act calls for restitution of cost incurred while processing request. I do know that clause was added just for the purpose of thwarting general public access. What I don’t see is how they can get away with charging more than an average fair market charge. I do know I have a new project to work on. These greasy government deals with short strings attached made up solely for the appearance of democracy while undermining it have got to stop.
I am not surprised. The old phrase ” it not only has to be right, it has to looke right” This smells to high heaven, as does the Sanford regime. where is someone with deep pockets to call the bluff. The Greeville News spent thousands digging up a landfill to bag Jim Holderman. Where are they now. Sanford is now for complaining when some other sleazey deal goes down instead of HIS sleazey deal. I am sure that the emails concerned are now lost in cyberspace. Its ijust like erased dictaphone tapes were under Nixon. The faces change, but the game remains the same.
Nosofasttherepardner.
Speaking as someone who a few years back was in charge of that same mail system - that’s *not* a simple operation.
It’s certainly not 15 minutes of my time - and I’m a damn good tech.
Nor would it be a complete response when I was done - the nature of email is such that there’s no mechanism for preserving it like other records. Trust me. I went around with Archives about this for quite some time as to what it would require to “trap” all email and make it searchable.
It wasn’t chump change, and it was more than every IT budget in S.C. State Government at that time.
$1200 is a bargain.
Not only would every email have to be vetted (quite a few would not fall within FOIA guidelines), you’d have to have a method of actually pulling them, vetting them - and trust me - The Governor’s Office isn’t going to let some tech read through all their mail. This would require a tech to (somehow) (I could tell you how I’d have done it, and it wouldn’t have been simple, easy, or cheap, but they’ve since changed email systems (making this even harder)) pull the mail, someone to vet the mail and then save it somewhere for archiving.
The more practical matter would be to issue a directive to everyone in the Governor’s office to read the mail from those days, and to forward anything not excluded from FOIA to a common mailbox, and then pass it along. 4 days of mail, everybody in the office.
(I’m not trying to defend Sanford here - don’t know him. But that’s not a reasonable request, and if you didn’t charge for that time, I’d guess easily an hour each - presuming the email you’d be looking for would be still available and not deleted or purged - then you could utterly shut down the Governor’s office with similar requests. Which has its own set of benefits, but be honest about your motives.
State Senator Brad Hutto calls for investigation of Governor Mark Sanford in Port Royal deal - Beaufort County, SC
State Senator Brad Hutto says he is filing legislation that calls for an investigation of Governor Mark Sanford’s involvement in the sale of a port land near Beaufort.
Hutto told the Senate on Wednesday that an investigation is the only way to get answers to questions about Sanford’s involvement in selling the valuable waterfront Port Royal property.
Sanford’s office has said it would welcome an impartial investigation.
http://www.wtoc.com/Global/story.asp?S=7934261
But isn’t Mark Sanfrod the transparency Governor?
Hey Unix-Jedi,
I would simply send a FOIA to other state agencies asking them how much they would charge. Then, you will see the intent of the Governor, which, I presume is to make the data cost-prohibitive.
I am sure the nesxt Governor of SC will be a Democrat and more responsive to the people.
And a red state(SC) is getting ready to turn black and blue because Obama is the next POTUS.
To Unix-Jedi,
I think the point of this request is to highlight the fact that despite the claim that all public records are accessible, the systems in place actually place records out of reach of all but the deepest pockets. There is an internal storage/processing problem if records are only ‘open’ at such a high cost in time, labor and dollars.
My .02
Elizabeth:
The point of the request might well be for that. But the comment that it’s a 15 minute job is ludicrous.
Nor is it easy to set up a system to do that - when I specced it, probably in 97 or 98, we were looking at - at least - $15M. For the setup. And $3-5M per year. And my estimate on the growth was low. (as I can state definitively now). Even after you had that set up, the access controls are hardly trivial. (And that presumes that my solution would have worked as well as I think it would have, but more importantly, the size of that project would have taken it into bidding territory, and I’ve never seen one of those projects work. Check out child support enforcement and that boondoggle if you need to know more.)
Most records requests are cheap, they’re just subsidized, and most people don’t see the true cost. Knowing the amount of time it would take to undertake something like this lets you see that $1200 isn’t that high of an estimate. I too worry about the problem with making it expensive to examine records (but “all email?”), but the solution cannot ignore the total *real* cost.
Unix - Your cost analysis is based on the fact that you “specced (sic) it in 97 or 98″? HA! Are you telling me that the governor’s office is using technology from 1997? That in itself is a good story.
Al Gore had barely invented the Internet tubes in 1997 and absolutely nothing about the Web then is reflected in today’s technology. Especially not with e-mail. As a “Unix Jedi” or e-mail guru or whatever you are, you of all people should know that.
Obviously the 15 minute remark was hyperbole, but the point still stands. The governor’s office cannot legally try to make a profit from FOIA requests. And they certainly cannot jack the price in an attempt to deter people.
^^What Fogel said.^^
Adam:
I believe I was clear enough as to what I said. This is an issue that I have a great deal of personal experience with - and I’ve considered the implications. You would obviously appear not to understand the technology, the legal aspects, the work involved, but you think all of that is meaningless.
The point does not stand. The 15 minute comment wasn’t even hyperbole, it was sheer ignorance. The point is further fatally flawed by your sneering celebration of the aforementioned ignorance. As I said, you’re probably looking at at least an hour of work, for each person in the office. Plus the time of whoever is going to compile, sort, and double-check. Every email over the space of 4 days.
As I recall, there were about 50 employees in the GO when I was supporting them. 1200/50 = $24/hr. For the first hour alone. That’s not counting the lawyer you’ll have doing the sorting. You start adding that up, and $1200 isn’t by any means “making a profit”. Even if there are a few less, an average pay of $24/hr (remember, that’s the average compensation - do you think that sounds reasonable for an average wage across that office?) When I was there, well more than 1/2 the office would be making a lot more than that. Ok. Presume that the lowest paid admin assistants (who are probably at least at $20/hr) do it. That leaves you what for the lawers?
It might be slightly high, or low, but my first eyeball and estimation would label that as reasonable. (Actually, as I said, low.) Your “hyperbole” demonstrates that you do not have a handle on what the request would take. Sneering further at me hardly demonstrates any better judgement.
As to the technology between then and now, no, there hasn’t been a lot of *substantiative* difference. I don’t remember when we upgraded their post office, but they were running a centralized database-backended , secure email system. At some point, we upgraded them off of the main Pentium - with the floating point error, no less! - running Novell 3.12 to the NetFRAME running 4.10. And now to Pentium 4 servers (so I hear). MCA to PCI-X. We were running IPX for the Novell server, now it would all be wrapped in IP. Wait, IP is older than NetBIOS, for the Windows servers they’re using now… Newer! .. Right? (We could have encapsulated IPX with IP back then. But it was a lot of trouble.)
But the *technology* is hardly changed. Not from a gross perspective. Still client-server, still centralized email, stored in a database format. They’ve since degraded it to the industry-leading (in headaches) email backend. That too was around in 97 and 98. Sure, minor upgrades. But nothing like the quantum leap you’d be hypothesising. *Web* technology *has* progressed greatly in some ways. But we’re talking *e-mail*. The email in the office then is different only in cosmetic appearance.
I’d say trust me on this, but if personal experience, demonstrated fact, basic math and Econ 101 hasn’t made that point, I’d say it’s a forlorn hope.
Let me see, it does cost a few dollars to go fishing for mythical material and I have to agree with Unix-Jedi. Were it not for the fact that it seems Mr. Hodges office is guilty of the same outrage on a number of occasions, setting a precedent of sauce for the blue goose to be sauce for the red gander.