These examples are offered to demonstrate the problems associated with (a) the wide variety of labor charges being used, (b) the wide-ranging nature of some requests, (c) the number of responsive documents that have to be processed, (d) the percentage of the total attributable to exclusion review and (e) additional issues.
VCOG receives dozens of calls and emails about fees, but not all of them are supported by the actual back-and-forth between the government body and the requester as these examples are.
A citizen in Charles City County was charged $95.96 (4 hours at $23.99/hour) for an employee to watch her examine public records in person.
A reporter was told that four Department of Emergency Management employees, making between $25 and $48.08 per hour, would be working at an off-site facility for an unspecified amount of time to retrieve "every no-bid contract that's been signed by VDEM from March 7, 2020, to April 7, 2021." Payment by credit card was not accepted.
A judge ruled the City of Richmond improperly charged a citizen $2,000 for the same records it provided to a newspaper for a couple of hundred dollars.
Poquoson City Public Schools said it would cost $1,500.82 for 23 days of email among 9 different people. Sixty-one percent of the total was for exclusion review at a rate of $55.99/hour and 13 hours of it was for an IT professional to search for and print the records.
In a response to a request for the internal policy manuals for the Roanoke City Police Department, a requester was told that it would cost $13.50 per report for 200 reports, plus $1,077 (50 hours at $21.54/hour) to prepare them.
Richmond Public Schools estimated it would cost $388.64 to provide any document "that deals with facility improvement, corrections, and repairs suggested or carried out to RPS HVAC/heating/cooling systems from January 2020" to March 2021. The response said it would take 7 hours at a rate of $55.52/hour; the number of documents involved was not noted.
Charlottesville gave an estimate of $212 for a list of city employee email addresses and work phone numbers, but there was no explanation of how the total amount was calculated.
Charlottesville shared an estimate of what a third-party storage facility estimated it would cost them (Charlottesville) to produce records related to the Unite the Right Rally: a minimum of $20,000.
The University of Mary Washington gave a very detailed response to a very complex and far-reaching request. Some records were provided for free. The estimate, however, included time for two people to redact some records (one to redact, one to make sure the redactions worked), time to provide an unrequested narrative and time to read through requested policies to make sure they were up to date.
Virginia Tech gave an estimate of $337 for emails among several administrators on one specific day. The estimate for the work -- which is made to sound very complicated -- includes the implication that $200 is what it will charge to search any email account.
In response to a very broad request (for 5 years worth of complaints = an estimated 400 documents), the Virginia Department of Education estimated it would cost $5,328 to review the records at an "agency rate" of $19.98/hour.
The Office of the Attorney General told a citizen looking for billing records for a particular completed legal action that it would cost more than $200 to review and redact "well over 400 pages" but did not break charges down or give an estimated total.
The University of Virginia said it would charge $150 per email account to search for specific terms over a 1.5-month period. Another response from UVA reiterated the $150/account search for 158 email accounts for a total of $23,700. This request was also for a 1.5-month period and was limited to specific keywords.
The University of Virginia said it would charge $50 per gigabyte of data to search for records related to the production of a documentary film. The total estimate for the search alone was $1,000 -- three email accounts totally 20 gigabytes of data.