Look in on the Pulaski County Quorum Court any given week and you can expect to find stupidity, particularly when matters include legal advice from County Attorney Karla Burnett. Burnett has utter disdain for the public — remember her effort to keep the public from seeing public records of the felonious former county comptroller? And don’t forget when she barred a citizens group from a meeting about how county government intended to give away the ranch to developers in the Lake Maumelle Watershed.

Now she’s thrown in with JPs Steve Goss and Alan Kerr to to make on-line access of public records nearly impossible. She tells the Democrat-Gazette that she believes their idea to charge a confiscatory fee to view records on-line is legal. 50 cents for the first page. 25 cents for each succeeding page! Absurd. The county clerk’s budget is little different now than when they weren’t putting records on-line, so it’s clear the cost of putting the millions of pages on-line doesn’t approach an infinitesimal fraction of that cost. Public offices may only recover the cost of providing copies of public documents. Copy machines clearly have cost. Scanning pages for digital preservation is not a cost of making the records available for the public. If this fee were to stand, you could just as easily impose a per-page charge to visit the clerk’s office to peruse, not copy, public files.

Advertisement

This proposed fee is a pretext to shut off the convenience of Internet public access. It responds to a virtually non-existent problem — the potential that identity thieves might set off on needle-in-haystack searches for the odd Social Security number that has slipped into public records despite rules against their inclusion. As we know well, there are far easier ways to get personal information by going after information caches where vital personal information is universally collected — retail clerks copying credit numbers, hospital employees rifling files, etc.

Clerk Pat O’Brien is standing up for common sense and the public in this matter. But he’ll need some support against this bunch.

Advertisement

PS — In the federal courts, where case files can become enormous, I’ve long chafed at the fee charged for some of the access — eight cents a page. But, even there, you get some free access to files, including a free look, if not download, of new decisions and initial filings.

Be a part of something bigger

As a reader of the Arkansas Times, you know we’re dedicated to bringing you tough, determined, and feisty journalism that holds the powerful accountable. For 50 years, we've been fighting the good fight in Little Rock and beyond – with your support, we can do even more. By becoming a subscriber or donating as little as $1 to our efforts, you'll not only have access to all of our articles, but you'll also be helping us hire more writers to expand our coverage and continue to bring important stories to light. With over 63,000 Facebook followers, 58,000 Twitter followers, 35,000 Arkansas blog followers, and 70,000 daily email blasts, it's clear that our readers value our great journalism. Join us in the fight for truth.

Previous article A lesson on public money Next article Obama loses halo