The Chronicle‘s Matt Stiles blogs about his efforts to pry public information out of HPD, and his fallback method when the usual procedures don’t work quite right:
Around the same time, I made an open-records request to the Houston Police Department for images and videos captured in six of these citations. An official in the open-records unit replied 10 business days later:
Pursuant to your request, before the requested information can be distributed, advance payment is required. A minimum research charge of $250 (2hrs x $125) has been established. You must pay in the form of a cashier’s check or money order; made out to American Traffic Solutions, Inc.
Say what? The city’s open-records billing policy follows state law, which sets the price for research/labor time at $15 per hour, not $125. And why was I being asked to pay the contractor, not the city?
HPD’s understaffed and overworked open-records office told me that American Traffic Solutions had set that price. I didn’t think that was legal, so I complained to Mayor White’s press office, as I often do when I get resistance from city departments, and the police backed off the higher price.
This was in mid-March. But the department didn’t release the photos until late Friday: 55 working days after my original request.
Stiles is persistent, and knows how to work the system to get information for his newspaper (and the public, ultimately). It’s unfortunate that public entities like HPD and METRO sometimes frustrate the dissemination of public information, and that it takes such persistence.
In any case, kudos to Stiles (and the city’s other journalists) who manage to dig up all the good stuff that serves as conversation fodder here and elsewhere. It’s not always the easiest thing to do.
