So we got a reply from the county of Kauai today and its not looking good.
We asked for the AG required reports from the year 2000 to the year 2018. The county does not keep records that far back and as such are willing to provide all the ones they have. These reports are required every month and from 2005 to 2018 there would be a minimum of 156 pages generated (1 a month + a yearly report) Kauai is offering us 14 pages of documents………
We asked for a waiver of fees and the reporting agency is meant to give a breakdown on these fees for time spent researching and collecting and for actual cost of copying. What we got was a bill for $7 with no breakdown. Now if we assume they waived the fees for researching and collecting then this works out to a total of $0.50 a page ($7/14). Not exuberant but maybe a little high compared to actual cost of copies. Its also worth noting that the county/PD also has our e-mail and fax number so could in fact send this information to us with no further cost.
“Public interest waiver.” The agency is required to waive $60 of the total fees for search, review, and segregation if it finds that the public interest would be served because (1) the record is not readily available to the public and (2) the requester intends and has the actual ability to widely disseminate the information to the public.”
Whats more worrying is the timeline. We sent the request on September 17th (as indicated in the letter and the fax report (we always fax request to verify time and date and keep a permanent record on our phone bill. It also allows us to get a report saying the document was received ) The PG claim they did no t receive the letter until October 2nd (bear in mind we faxed it to the chiefs office) So there is a HUGE discrepancy int he time line as this document is meant to be responded to in 10 days per Hawaii law and we did not get a response until October 15th. A FULL 28 DAYS. Not to forget we submitted 3 requests and have only received a response for one, We have reached out to the PD for clarification and will update when we get the documents requests and when we have a response on the timeline discrepancy.
