The administration of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said this week that news organizations will have to fork over as much as $15 million to obtain emails from state employees, an astronomical figure officials said is justified by the hundreds of hours of work technicians would have to devote to searching individual accounts.
“When the Associated Press asked for all state e-mails sent to the governor’s husband, Todd Palin, her office said it would take up to six hours of a programmer’s time to assemble the e-mail of just a single state employee, then another two hours for “security” checks, and finally five hours to search the e-mail for whatever word or topic the requestor is seeking,” MSNBC reported Friday. “At $73.87 an hour, that’s $960.31 for a single e-mail account. And there are 16,000 full-time state employees. The cost quoted to the AP: $15,364,960.”
The fee does not include duplication costs. The AP requested state officials to waive the fee, which was denied. The wire service did not say whether it would spend the money to obtain the records.
But state Attorney General Talis Colberg has indicated that any reque document requests won’t be fulfilled until after at least two weeks the Nov. 4 presidential election.
Ruth Heese, the state’s senior assistant general, said that Alaska’s “current budge climate” coupled with intense media interest in Palin’s communications with her staffers, particularly in light of the “troopergate” probe, is partially the reason the state has put an eight-digit price tag on the documents.
“State agencies cannot foresee every exceptional circumstance that might make a waiver in the public interest,” Heese told the Associated Press Friday. “In the current budget climate, however, cost is a very important element of the decision.”
The Associted Press report said “Alaska officials said they have been swamped with requests for copies of state records ever since Palin was selected to be Republican John McCain’s running mate. The state said it is waiving fees for modest requests and offering news organizations the opportunity to fine-tune their requests to avoid high fees.”‘
But suspicions are mounting that the high cost of the documents are meant to discourage interested parties from accessing Palin’s records because of the possibility the documents may contain information damaging to the governor.
The Public Record reported earlier this month that Palin’s office charged the Public Safety Employees Association, the union that represents state troopers and other civil servants, $88,000 to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act request.
The union alleges Palin’s office illegally accessed her former brother-in-law’s personnel and workers compensation files and disseminated confidential information to a top Alaska state trooper official in an attempt to get her ex brother-law, state trooper Mike Wooten, fired.
An investigative report released last week by state lawmakers concluded Palin abused her authority and broke state ethics laws by sanctioning a campaign to pressure subordinates to fire Wooten. The independent counsel, Steve Branchflower, who conducted the probe and wrote the report noted resistance to his investigation from senior Palin aides, including Attorney General Talis Colberg, who “failed to substantially comply with my Aug. 6, 2008, written request to Gov. Sarah Palin for information about the case in the form of e-mails.”
In August, the union filed an ethics complaint against Palin alleging unauthorized access to Wooten’s personnel files.
John Cyr, the director of the PSEA, also filed a FOIA request for emails after an audio recording surfaced in July that showed Palin’s director of state boards and commissions, Frank Bailey, telephoned police Lt. Rodney Dial last February to inquire about union issues involving state troopers and outlined disparaging details about Wooten’s finances and personal behavior that appear to have come from his personnel file.
Cyr said he believes more than 1,000 e-mails were exchanged between Bailey, and Sarah and Todd Palin, and other officials from Palin’s administration that, if released, would show that Palin and her aides kept tabs on Wooten and perhaps discussed information about the trooper that could only have been obtained by illegally accessing the trooper’s confidential files.
Cyr said he filed a FOIA request on behalf of the union to obtain the e-mails, but the governor’s office said in a written response it would cost the union $88,000 for the documents.
“That seems a little steep,” Cyr said. “And suspicious.”
Palin has refused to voluntarily release the e-mails.
On Wednesday, an Alaska Superior Court Judge ordered Palin’s administration to immediately preserve emails she and her aides sent from private accounts dating back to December 2006.
A state official said email sent between the governor’s staff and their private Yahoo e-mail accounts won’t be collected until Oct. 31.
“Searches will take an additional two weeks, until Nov. 14. And then the legal review of each e-mail will begin. There’s no telling how long that will take, because no one knows how many e-mails there are,” wrote Linda J. Perez, administrative director for the governor, in a letter she sent to the state attorney general seeking approval for a delay.
The ruling was issued in response to a lawsuit filed against Palin by former state employee turned government watchdog Andree McLeod, who claims Palin has been using her private email account to conduct state business. McLeod has been trying to gain access to thousands of pages of Palin’s government emails through an open records act request.
Anchorage Superior Court Judge Craig Stowers did not, however, order Palin and her staff to discontinue using private email accounts to conduct official government business. Stowers said he would consider whether Palin and her staffers should refrain from using their private email accounts after hearing arguments from McLeod’s attorney and the Alaska attorney general’s office. Stowers ordered McLeod’s attorney to file a brief within 10 days stating reasons that Palin and her staff should stop using their private accounts. Stowers said the state of Alaska would have 10 days to file a response.
McLeod’s attorney, Don Mitchell, said Palin’s use of a private email account to conduct state business was tantamount to “obstruction.”
Using private emails to discuss state business is a “cutout system that has the happy consequence of not making these records readily available,” Mitchell said.
In June, Palin’s office turned over to McLeod four boxes of heavily redacted emails. The Palin administration has cited executive privilege in its refusal to voluntarily turn over more than 1,000 emails to McLeod.
