FOIA Friday: Getting priced out of public records

Our quest for public records shedding light on Olympia Development's mysterious parking tickets hit another roadblock.

• Faced with a $4,856 bill, we're forced to close this request for now.

Why it matters: Obtaining public records can be costly — as we've documented in our weekly spotlight.

• News organizations and citizens have limited resources and sometimes cannot afford records without knowing if the disclosed information is worth it.

What happened: After Free Press columnist Nancy Kaffer wrote about Olympia's tickets, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request on May 13 for six weeks' worth of emails including keywords such as "parking" and "Olympia" for four city officials.

• The city said it would take a whopping $17,664 and two years to get the records.

The latest: We narrowed the request by trimming the list of officials whose emails we wanted to three and asking for fewer keyword searches.

• The fee dropped by nearly $13,000 and our estimated wait-time was reduced to 10 months.

The bottom line: But without knowing whether the emails would help answer questions about Olympia's authority to write the tickets, we can't justify paying so much while waiting nearly a year.

• We may file another FOIA request on this topic in the future.