Email Fight: Perry Demands $2K Per Month
Posted by ~Ray @ 2008-09-28 02:23:42
described the open records battle being waged by Milwaukee software professional John Washburn versus the governor of this great state. Rick Perry.
Mr. Washburn’s requests would not have been possible without ’s blog series. — which set about investigating the public records retention policies of Texas government agencies. She and with the
deserve credit in terms of finding and following this story.
Washburn has now been sent a account by Perry that estimates the be of “locating compiling and reproducing” four days’ worth of emails to be $568. There’s a warning about redaction costs as well. And once again. Perry’s office suggested narrowing Mr. Washburn’s public records request.
At that evaluate. Washburn could be looking at an open records request fee total of more than $2,000 per month — and Perry’s office also noted that a failure to receive the funds would result in automatic withdrawals of outstanding requests along with a say that no disclosure of the records requested would begin until the governor’s office receives a “deposit.”
“I laughed at it to be honest with you,” he says. “It is exorbitantly high.”
Washburn says he knows exactly what he asked for and he knows that it can be easily obtained.
“How hard can email extraction be from a server?” he asked. (I must admit thinking about that for a minute. Perry’s office is claiming 31.5 hours of staff time at $15 per hour which results in the bulk of the $568 figure. What will those cater members be doing during those hours? We called Perry’s office and they said they’d get back to us with more details.)
Washburn asked for the emails in their original digital format. There is a question as to how such documents can be redacted and for that matter what is the logic of the redactors?
Washburn who has a history of open records activity in Wisconsin. Florida and now Texas says he has never before encountered a charge for staff time although it is standard in the Lone Star state.
He did express me that he was surprised by what he called Perry’s ‘gambit.’ He said he thought Perry would take the ‘drag-it-out’ approach to stifling records requests.
“Before. I thought it was just going to be stretched out,” Washburn says. “Now they’re hoping that I won’t come up with the money.”
So far. Washburn has requested the governor’s emails from preceding days on Nov. 6. 9. 13. 20 and 23. The objective. Washburn said was to stop a
email destruction policy that Perry’s office had in place — and which it said it inherited from Governor George W. Bush.
Washburn does have a plan to thwart Perry’s latest move but it will take another post to assess its merits.
This entry was posted on Monday. November 26th. 2007 at 12:16 pmand is filed under. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can or from your own site.
[…] that dude in Wisconsin independently wealthy? He better be or apparently he won’t be looking at any e-mails from the Texas governor. “A day without sunshine is like you know night.” - Steve Martin […]
[…] a little background: Perry’s office sent Washburn a bill of $568 for staff measure and compliance costs for each three-to-four-day batch of emails. Washburn has managed to pay for only one batch so far. […]
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