AgdaPkt 2010-04-12 - Laserfiche WebLink

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April 12, 2010 SUBJECT Proposed Information Technology hourly rate for satisfying public records act requests under the Public Records Act. RECOMMENDATION Approve, by resolution, the following Information Technology hourly fees to be applied when satisfying public records act requests: fiscal year 2009-2010, $73.59; fiscal year 2010-2011, $74.22. BACKGROUND The Public Records Act (PRA) is designed to give the public access to records in possession of public agencies (Government Code Section 6250 - 6270). "Public records" include any writing containing information relating to the conduct of the public's business prepared, owned, used, or retained by any State or local agency, regardless of physical form or characteristics. The PRA allows for the recovery of costs incurred to reproduce and deliver the record to the requestor when the records being requested required data compilation, extraction, or programming and are not already being produced in the format requested. Many PRA requests to the City involve significant Information Technology staff time to satisfy, especially when they involve the searching of email correspondence, or the extraction of payroll and/or financial data from our financial system. ALTERNATIVES The Council could opt not to adopt a fee schedule and absorb the cost internally. This is not recommended as the cost can be quite significant depending on the complexity of the request and where the source data resides. The amount of time can be anywhere from a few hours to many days. The Council could adopt a lower fee schedule which does not fully recover the cost to satisfy public records requests. This is also not recommended for the above reasons. FISCAL IMPACT The hourly cost (salary plus benefits) of a Senior Information Technology Analyst, typically required to satisfy requests, is $73.59 for fiscal year 2009-10. The estimated revenue for a fiscal year depends upon the number and complexity of requests. This year's requests have been minimal and not very time consuming to satisfy. In years past we have had complex requests which involved several days of staff time to perform detailed searches which could have generated several thousand dollars of revenue. In addition to the direct labor cost to satisfy a request, there is the lost opportunity of selling that same staff member's time to another agency.