County taxpayers pick up tab of The Gazette’s fishing expedition

Mr. Tallman incorrectly characterized The Gazette’s request as asking for travel records ‘‘for high-level administrators, including department directors, superintendents, Circuit Court judges and their assistants.”

In May, Gazette reporter Janel Davis sent a letter to the M-NCPPC requesting travel-related records for Planning Board members, department directors and ‘‘any other employees who travel on county-related business” from 2004 through 2007.

With some 1,200 people employed in the Department of Parks and the Planning Department since 2004, we informed Ms. Davis that our agency — as allowed by law — would charge The Gazette for the time it took to research, compile and copy documents. She repeated that she wanted all of the information for all employees.

So, in good faith, six Park and Planning employees in our Finance Department spent more than 30 hours — on evenings and weekends — to cull more than 5,625 pages of records. It cost $1,843.67 in staff salary to answer the request. If The Gazette wanted every record copied, at a dime a page, it would have cost $562.60 more.

When we called Ms. Davis to inform her that the documents were ready for inspection, we reiterated that we would charge for the research, as allowed by law. Several weeks went by and she told us that an editor was still deciding whether to pay the fees. Although Mr. Tallman’s story indicated that The Gazette objected to the fees, at no point did Ms. Davis or any editor ask us to consider waiving the fees. According to the law, anyone filing a MPIA request can ask for the research fees to be waived.

When we placed another call to Ms. Davis reminding her that our information was ready for inspection, she informed us that The Gazette did not have the money in its current budget to pay the fees and that the newspaper no longer wanted the information.

To our surprise, the following day, we received a call from The Gazette’s Annapolis Bureau Chief Doug Tallman telling us he was writing a story on how the various government agencies responded to the original MPIA request.

He asked why Park and Planning was charging such high fees for the information and suggested that this was a very simple request for information, that it should be easy to generate and it shouldn’t take much time to compile.

The M-NCPPC is committed to providing the public with timely information on how taxpayer dollars are spent. We fully complied with the law in researching the information and requesting that The Gazette pay the cost of staff time associated with the extensive research.

Newspapers are often rightfully concerned about government waste and poorly spent taxpayer dollars. Because The Gazette won’t pay its bill, Montgomery County taxpayers must do so.

The Gazette did a disservice to its readers by misinforming them about this MPIA process and to county taxpayers by forcing them to pay for this wasteful fishing expedition.

Nancy C. Lineman, Silver Spring

The writer is M-NCPPC’s chief of community outreach and media relations.