In the Oregon State Senate, the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association made a request that the Senate Judiciary Committee do them a favor.
And the committee obliged. Just what was the favor, you ask?
Make it so that they no longer have to pay for public records searches, AND pass the costs onto the general public.
Fourth Estate, indeed.
On reading the Bill, I note that while the Fourth Estate is included, it is not specific to the Fourth Estate.
A little background on this issue: For the last twenty years or so, it has been a standard anarchist’s tactic to issue requests for public documents in huge volume to various levels of government. What these requests do is tie up all the personnel in those offices so that they can’t get their jobs done and it can SERIOUSLY slow down the machinery of government, which is not too fast to start with.
Consequently, the governments came up with a fee (these records used to be free to anyone) system to discourage the anarchists. In some cases, the fees were set way too high, and the fee structure even reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which made a nine-cent-per-page fee standard with a court ruling about 5 years ago. I know all this stuff because I was sued by an anarchist some years back and this chump tried to choke out the Sheriff’s Records Unit by issuing a subpoena for thousands of pages of documents. In court, he was held to the nine-cent copying fee, and he faded fast after that, and his suit was dismissed.
This bill essentially returns the situation to the “status quo ante”, but allows a variable fee, with will not pass muster with the Ninth Circuit. It’s an equal protection thing I would guess.