San Jose Relents on Fees for Public Information

San Jose citizens who want to know if the city’s becoming more dangerous will no longer have to pay the police department to find out. A key victory for public information access was scored last week when the city’s Rules and Open Government Committee—comprised of three council members and the mayor—voted unanimously to overrule a $42 charge request by the SJPD’s research unit for an annual crime stat requested by Metro.

Both the city’s public records manager and its top public information officer stood by the fee, so Metro exercised its right to appeal under the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. “Given the current fiscal situation, the Administration does not believe the City should waive the fees and absorb the cost for producing the requested records,” Director of Communications Tom Manheim wrote in a memo opposing Metro‘s appeal.

Police Chief Chris Moore, caught in a web of cost-recovery policies that prevented him from waiving the fee, apologized to council members. “This is the first time I am aware of that this wound up on the agenda of the Rules Committee,” Moore said. “I apologize for this rising to this level.”

Under city sunshine rules, staff may levy charges to members of the public who request information that is not already in document form. Since more and more information is stored in electronic databases, programming fees are charged for conducting queries.

Metro‘s crime stats request was an attempt to get some actual information on a hotly debated issue that has been the subject of fierce debate on public safety issues and police salaries and pensions. Over the last few months, various media outlets have reported anecdotal evidence that prostitution is on the rise in San Jose. The police union blog, Protect San Jose, linked budget cuts with a teenage girl from Fresno being forced into prostitution as an example of the crisis. “San Jose is Becoming Sin City,” wrote a top police union in a column, and television stations broadcast images of short-skirted women standing on city sidewalks in provocative poses.

Metro asked the police for stats on annual prostitution arrests over the past decade to see if trends supported the claims. A police analyst said the information would require 30 minutes of search-related work, necessitating the $42 fee. Budget troubles have forced the cash-strapped municipality to implement a number of new cost-recovery measures, including a payment structure for public information other than easily accessible reports. Broad requests by researchers, the media, citizen activists and litigious attorneys further stretch an already thin workforce, city officials say.

Metro made a formal appeal rather than pay the fee, setting in motion an expensive bureaucratic chain of events.

At first, the city’s Rules and Open Government committee planned to deny the appeal. But city officials now admit that it took far more work-hours to discuss whether to invoice the charge than the 30 minutes it would have taken to provide the requested statistics. Just the hearing’s 15 minutes of discussion—involving some of San Jose’s most highly-paid officials—incurred considerably more expense than it would have cost for a technician to produce the report itself.

After weeks of phone calls, emails and in-person conversations with city officials regarding the matter, Police Chief Chris Moore provided Metro with the numbers a day before appearing in front of the committee, bypassing the fee requirement by requesting the data for his own use.

“The Chief of Police was interested in seeing this information himself,” Mannheim said.

(Through the first eight months of the year, San Jose Police report that 253 arrests were made relating to misdemeanor and felony prostitution, pimping and pandering charges. That number puts the city on pace for roughly the same annual number of arrests seen from 2005 to 2009, when there were as many as 408 and no fewer than 374 arrests. The police, however, say that hours dedicated to the issue have dropped significantly, raising the possibility that prostitution activity is in fact increasing.)

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