Tuesday, May 28, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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Next week, the Nevada Board of Regents will take a step toward deciding whether to let a little more sunlight into their operations.
The regents have scheduled a presentation about the board’s public records policy during its June 6-7 meeting in Reno. According to the agenda, the presentation will focus on how the board’s current policies compare with state statutes and with the policies of other public bodies in Nevada. If an ordinance to reform the state statutes passes the Nevada Legislature between now and then, that will be part of the conversation too.
It’s commendable for the regents to be examining this issue.
Right now, the board is anything but a picture of transparency in terms of providing access to its records.
Full disclosure here: The Sun knows this because we’ve been involved in a months-long effort to obtain a body of emails from the regents.
The upshot of our request was that we were told after two months of waiting that about a quarter of the emails we’d sought were likely to be deemed “privileged” and would not be made available. And for the rest, we’d be charged 50 cents per page, for a total of about $1,700. Pretty big price tag for records that didn’t even need to be photocopied and mailed.
And what’s more, while state law allows for such fees to be waived, the regents have no such provision. They passed a policy in 2014 requiring the fees to be charged. No exceptions.
So we brought the issue to the regents’ attention. And to their credit, they’re now looking into it.
Based on agenda materials, which include details about the policies of six other governmental organizations, the presentation is likely to show that open records policies are all over the board. “Actual fees” in those policies — costs associated with photocopying and mailing records — range from a nickel to $1 per page.
Meanwhile, most charge fees for “extraordinary use of resources,” like legal reviews. By the way, that was the reason the regents wanted us to pay the $1,700.
So the presentation could offer some interesting insight into the extent of government transparency at various levels.
Frankly, there’s a lot of room for improvement, not just for the regents but other public bodies as well.
It’s one thing to charge for hard costs of fulfilling requests for hard documents — paper, printer cartridges, postage, etc. — but the “extraordinary use” fees are another matter entirely. It’s hardly an extraordinary task for in-house counsel to review documents, for instance, considering that’s what they’re paid to do as a matter of course.
And while public offices should be protected from trolls who would essentially hijack the government by making demands for millions of records, there should always be a fee waiver option for requests that serve a legitimate public interest.
There should also be protections for the requesters — governmental organizations should not effectively be given permission to price records out of the public’s reach.
Let’s take the Sun out of the equation in our request and imagine that it instead came from an individual representing himself, from a small nonprofit or from another organization with modest means. Is it fostering good, responsible government to charge $1,700 for electronic documents? And to make those fees mandatory?
No and no.
So here’s hoping the regents’ upcoming discussion leads to some changes in the board’s policy — not only because we’d like to get our records, but because it would be good for all Nevadans to have easier access to information.
And may it prompt other public offices to take a look at their policies.
