04/11/03 Records Dept.: We Think Public Records Should Cost $4,800 (Ed Goppelt)

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Records Dept.: We Think Public Records Should Cost $4,800
By Ed Goppelt Friday, 04/11/03 (1050069251157)

Tell the Mayor public records should be made available at reasonable cost to everyone.
The special treatment received by private companies must stop.

BREAKING NEWS, April 14, 2003--I will be meeting with the Records Dept. and its City lawyers on Tuesday, April 15, 2003 at 10:00 am. Finally, an appointment, a chance to talk to Records Commissioner Joan Decker face-to-face! It only took five months, dozens of letters, phone calls, personal visits and a law suit. Even then, I don't think the Commissioner would has agreed to speak with me if Rizzo and Cohen hadn't intervened. After weeks of promises by City lawyers, a meeting was only scheduled after Councilmembers Rizzo and Cohen communicated their conviction that citizens should have access to public records in the only terms the Records Dept. seems to understand: make public records available or face a cut in your budget.

I want Hallwatch users to be able to see who bought the house down the street last week and what they paid for it, without having to go to City Hall. To this end, I have asked the Records Dept. to sell me the Recorders Index Extract in a form I can post on Hallwatch.

The Recorders Index Extract is a computer file which contains summary information about all the transactions the Dept. records, including things like buyer name and sale price for deed transactions. View the record layout for the Recorder's Index Extract.

What I want is for the City to sell me the Recorders Index Extract at a reasonable price and in a form I can use.

Records Commissioner: Our Fee Is Based on Labor & Materials

The Records Dept. wants to charge $400 a month for what amounts to 3 floppy disks worth of information. This comes to $4,800 per year. View thier price list and data request form. Records Commissioner Joan Decker told me recently that her fee included the costs of labor and materials. I'm glad the Dept. bases its costs on labor and materials. But what are the actual costs? To date, the Dept. hasn't provided any specific breakdown of its costs that could be independently verified.

Hallwatch: Why is a Simple Data Dump so Expensive?

While the Dept.'s $4,800 fee may be "easily understandable" to City Lawyer Mike Eichert, I don't understand why a simple operation like dumping one month's worth of data should turn out to be so difficult for the Dept. and so expensive for me. For example, when I followed the same steps at home the Dept. would have to follow on its computers, the time, effort and materials involved turned out to be trivial:

Less than one minute to write the one line SQL query to extract the correct month's data
Negligible computer time on my aging VW beetle of a computer
2 minutes to burn the CD

I estimate the actual cost to the Department to be $2 per month or $24 per year. Read the basis for my estimate.

A computer firm would be willing to do the job for an annual fee of $100. Read the computer firm's basis for its price. The firm has actually gone ahead and extracted one month's data to show it's possible. View the data for June, 2002 as a textfile (4 Megabytes) or a compressed zip file (1 Megabyte).

Records Dept. Lawyer: "Solid Reasoning" lies behind $4,800 Charge for Public Records.

City Lawyer Joseph Bradica tells me that "solid reasoning" lies behind the $4,800 fee. What is needed here, in my opinion, is less "reasoning" and more facts. For example,what hardware and software does the Dept's PhilaDox system actually run on: the IBM mainframe or a modern PC based client-server system running Oracle?

How does the Department's fee compare to other City Departments?

One way to test the fairness of the Records Dept. price is to see what other City Dept.'s charge for data. The Dept.'s $4,800 fee fails this test. Although it offers far less information (fewer records with fewer fields in them), the Records Dept. charges four times as much as the Board of Revision of Taxes (BRT). Per megabye of data supplied, the Records Dept. charges over 200 times as much as the BRT.

Department Data Table # Records # Fields Megabytes
of Data Monthly Charge Cost Per Megabyte of Data

BRT Property File 565,000 74 226 $100 $0.44

Records Recorders Index Extract 20,000 33 4 $400 $100

Department	Data Table	# Records	# Fields	Megabytes of Data	Monthly Charge	Cost Per Megabyte of Data
BRT	Property File	565,000	74	226	$100	$0.44
Records	Recorders Index Extract	20,000	33	4	$400	$100

Records Dept. Has Played Favorites Before

City Lawyer Joseph Bradica assures me that "many individuals have paid these costs without complaint and that there is no evidence that you have been treated any differently." Why am I not reassured? Under Records Commissioner Decker, the Dept. has been caught several times giving special breaks to insiders. For example,

In 1997, Judge Gene Cohen had to order the Dept. to stop giving special treatment to stop giving special treatment to City Hall insiders and Federal officials who were getting their documents recorded ahead of the hoi-poloi's. At the time City Lawyer Mike Eichert vowed to appeal the Judge's ruling. Read Earni Young's 11/26/97 story in the Daily News.
In 2002, Tom Ferrick wrote about how accident victims were told they had to wait six weeks and pay $15 for a copy of their own accident report, while accident chasers working for law firms had instant access to the same reports for free? Read Tom Ferrick's 4/27/02 column in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
From 2000 to the present, the Dept. has provided a small group of companies with free web access to deed and other real estate records via its PhilaDox website. Ordinary Philadelphians need not apply: all 50 slots were given away long ago to title companies, banks and law firms. The Dept. says it can't charge the companies for this valuable service, because, even after 3 years, it is still an experimental "pilot".

What does the Law say?

I asked for these records under Pennsylvania's new Right to Know Act. The old law was widely abused by officials who used exorbitant fees among other tricks as a way of discouraging requests for public information. Perhaps for this reason, the new law has some very specific things to say about what officials may charge for public records:

Duplication fees must be reasonable and the standard for judging reasonableness is not government's cost, but what private business would charge for the same service. In other words, if Kinko's is charging 7 cents for self-service copies, government agencies can't charge the public 50 cents a page for the same service.
Costs must be directly related to the task at hand. In other words, an agency can't charge someone who just wants copies for heat and light because the agency would have to provide these things anyway.

How much data are we talking about here?

Not very much: In compressed form the Dept.'s 20,000 real estate transactions would easily fit on a single floppy disk. Uncompressed, the records represent 4 Megabytes of data. See how long it takes your computer to download $400 worth of real estate transactions.

Why are you suing the Records Dept.?

I sued because I felt I had no other choice. The Dept. sat on my request for months, was not truthful about the form records could be supplied in, and attempted to charge me a price that I believe to be exorbitant. Read the short and the long version of my law suit.

When Will Mayor Street Act to Correct Problems at his Records Dept.?

Commissioner Decker works for Mayor John Street. Ultimately, it is Mayor Street's job to ensure that Philadelphians have a Records Dept. that is efficient, provides for their needs, and is fair in the way it provides access to City Records.

Certainly the Mayor has been willing to take on difficult problems in the past. For example, he vetoed Bill 629, even though he risked alienating his generous contributors among the Billboard industry.

So why hasn't Mayor Street acted to correct the problems in his Dept.? It's not that the Mayor doesn't know the Records Dept. has problems: the Dept.'s inefficiency and favoritism have been widely reported on in the press. And in my letter of February 2, 2003 I told the Mayor about some of the problems I had personally experienced with the Records Dept.

Perhaps our Mayor still hasn't made up his mind whether fixing the Records Dept. is worth his while. I suspect we'll find out on April 15, 2003--tomorrow--how important having a Records Dept. that serves Philadelphians as well providing for the needs of corporations is to our Mayor.

Tell the Mayor you want public records made available at reasonable cost to everyone.
The special treatment received by private companies must stop.