Celtic Diva managed to trim the original bill of $65,000 to access information from the "hold me accountable" administration under Sarah Palin by requesting a lot less information ("freedom of" being a joke in this case).
The new price tag is still quite salty, over $5,500!
(Click on amounts for further details)
Linda will tell us how we can help her raise the money very soon.
I did some checking and found out that most companies and government agencies charge far less for the hours, manage to retrieve the information in a fraction of the time quoted by the state of Alaska and throw in the first 2 hours for nothing!
I obtained the following information from the National Security Archive website regarding federal agencies:
Other Requesters - Requesters who do not fit into any of the above categories. These requesters are persons who are not commercial, news media, scientific or educational requesters and are required to pay search costs for more than 2 hours and duplication costs for more than 100 pages.
Actual search, review and duplication fees vary by agency. Search/Review fees can be anywhere $8.00 to $45.00 per hour and duplication fees can be from $.10 to $.35 per page.
I had a look at how the states compare under the criteria devised by the Better Government Association and the National Freedom of Information Coalition. The results are interesting. Only two states manage to have worse scores than Alaska. (Click on table to enlarge)
The above table shows the worst scoring states. For full results covering all states, click here..
