Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court powerfully affirmed the
state's tradition of open and transparent government.
In a unanimous ruling, the court affirmed the statutory limits
the Legislature placed on public records fees and rejected the
argument that requesters can be required to pay "each and
every cost incurred by an authority."
The dispute between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the City
of Milwaukee arose from a 2010 request for two weeks of police
incident reports, which the newspaper sought to verify officially
reported crime statistics.
After producing the first 100 reports without charge, the city
demanded several thousand dollars for the staff time required to
review and redact confidential information from the remaining
records. The newspaper filed suit, arguing that the Open Records
Law does not authorize records custodians to charge requesters for
performing this task. I was the attorney who represented the
paper.
