A while back, reader Patricia A. wondered why the City of Brownsville had a public information officer but information requests were channeled through the city secretary’s office. The answer, it seems, is that we don’t have a public information officer. At some point, Bill Young’s position was retitled Community Relations Officer, or so it is according to City Secretary Estela Von Hutton, who sent a copy of the job description for the position (as a result of yet another information request made at an impromptu meeting when I went to her office to recover the information requests I’d made–I couldn’t recall when I’d filed them and hadn’t made a note on my calendar, a developing, not established, practice).

No word, yet, on what the cost of the information I’ve already requested. This is an interesting development and, one might surmise, an excellent tool for shutting up concerned citizens who want to know something in detail. If you make a request of the city that requires duplicating, it will cost you a nickel a page. If it requires clerical time, I believe the quote was fourteen dollars an hour. So, you need copies of, say, a thousand pages of public records, that will cost you fifty dollars. A bargain, really, for a thousand pages.. But if your request caused a clerk to spend–let’s be conservative–five hours, well, that’s going to add another seventy dollars. Now you’re up to $120 for public information, information that, as a taxpayer, you have paid for at least once already. But you’re at the mercy of whoever is writing the bill as to how many hours with which you are charged. So it might be twenty hours — not unreasonable for a thousand pages– but now, at $280 plus that fifty, you’re talking significant dollars for, say, a retired school marm.