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Show GUEST EDITORIAL Using GRAMA To Retail Public s Record By Bonnie Miller, Intermountain Commercial Record Utah state and local governments have reached the ultimate in a 10-year entrepreneurial venture aimed at selling access to government records for profit. House Bill 287, Government Records Access and Management Act Revisions is one more bill in a series of acts designed to fit state and local government's business plans. If H.B. 287 passes, public records will be retailed to the public at "fair market" prices. Government agencies will be permitted to contract with companies, sole source, and control by ordinance or policy the duplication duplica-tion and distribution of the material. Step by step, government gov-ernment has manipulated and amended the Government Records Access Management Act, GRAMA, to tighten agency control over and prevent public record access to records, held hostage in government computers, by erecting physical and financial barriers. Local and state governments have the responsibility to collect, store and manage records, for which taxpayers taxpay-ers pay. While some records are private, closed or confidential, con-fidential, other records are open to public inspection. Most court cases are open as are minutes from official government meetings. Historically, these records were called "public records." A copy of a public record was 25 cents and computer reports took but a few key strokes. Prior to the passage of GRAMA, records called "public records" changed name and ownership to "government records." Despite the task forces failure to endorse government agencies' efforts to copyright data-base contents the GRAMA task force voted it down. Only the right to copyright Olympic logos, and comparable items, was accepted by the task force. H.B. 287 treats public records and reports as copyrighted copy-righted material that citizens must purchase to access. Thus computerization of records, which should have promoted efficiency and freed staff from endless hunting, hunt-ing, now serves as a physical barrier to record access. Before the ink was dry on the 1990 GRAMA bill, state and local government agencies met to amend into the act what they had failed to, accomplish in the diverse and politically-balanced GRAMA task force. Instead of charging just a set per copy price, Utah's agencies acquired the right to retain the proceeds from the copies a huge incentive and opportunity for a new revenue source. For example, the Department of Transportation testified before the committee and admitted admit-ted the cost savings of installing a computer for public access to documents, however, they also said they preferred pre-ferred to continue charging $1 per copy and doing the search themselves because they counted on the additional addition-al revenue. Why should the taxpayers pay twice or for more staff to make copies? (Post GRAMA, the Department raised the charge to $3 dollars per copy.) H.B. 287 will be a turn around for GRAMA. Task force members consistently overcame the arguments of government directors on the committee and found that the public should not pay for public record access, only for copies. Still, the state's business plan was incomplete. Government agencies saw any use of public records-like publishing civil court records for businesses to keep track of dead beats-as a gold mine and made access difficult. dif-ficult. They tried selling computer access to the public, but it was expensive. Employees of the Department of Commerce tried to sell access at local business meetings to drum up "clients." They also consideredadvertising the sale of" records and services. But, after the fourth attempt to develop software, and two-and-one-half years later, the state contracted a private business to sell the state's records. This newspaper received four sales calls in the first two weeks. Whether the bidding was open ended or not, remains a mystery. But Utah became one of the few states that sole source the sale of government records, thus taking a partner in retailing records. H.B. 287 will erect additional financial barriers to the public's records and each department's budget increased by this hidden tax on the public. Decades ago, the federal fed-eral government tried sole source records, but the price rose to $20 a page. Thereafter, Republican presidents decided that government should warehouse, not retail records. All of which brings us to the crux of H.B. 287. This bill allows state and local agencies to resell public records and reports, already paid for with taxpayers' money for "fair market" prices. When businesses sell at fair market prices they must include overhead, employees, employ-ees, raw materials, sales, and taxes. And, private individuals indi-viduals and businesses must depend on demand and profit to stay in business. Government has underwriters-taxpayers-that can be charged for extra employees, unused computer software purchases, and overhead. Historically, government was not to provide services the free market can not. Nor should government compete with established businesses and increase the bureaucracy bureaucra-cy to do so. Why shouldn't government agencies sell public records, arbitrarily set prices and compete with private businesses which add value to the data? The answer is in what makes our country different than the centralized governments like Russia and China. As an example, the only way to obtain a list of business complaints against businesses which were dismissed was by paying for a printout of all actions. We supplied the paper and awaited the results. The results came in hundreds hun-dreds of pages and cost $900 it took a few key strokes to call it up. The results were the names of 32 businesses business-es that had cases dismissed, and they were printed in the newspaper for free certainly not a gold mine. On another occasion, we were told that a report would take 30 hours to run each time we placed an order. However, the order was e-mailed to us three hours after the order was placed. If the state is to go into business, we can only hope the Tax Commission and state auditors will keep them honest? i i |