Columbia collected $7,200 from open records requests last year
The city of Columbia collected at least $7,233.98 through charges for public records last year, according to a public record request made by ABC 17 News.
The list provided by the city accounts for payments made through the city’s year-old software to process those requests. The Columbia City Council approved a contract with WebQA in November 2016 to set up its online records request portal.
The list, however, does not include payments made in person. The Columbia Police Department, which receives the most records requests, still does not take payments online.
Community Relations department head Steve Sapp told ABC 17 News that the city tries to collect money for requests that either take longer than 10 minutes to put together or require more than 10 physical pages. Otherwise, Sapp said he discourages departments from charging for open records.
Sapp said the new software has allowed them to better track the number of records requests the city receives, which departments need help responding the requests in the legally-required three day period and how much money is being charged.
“We really didn’t have a good idea of what we were collecting in fees, how we were collecting those and where they were being deposited at,” Sapp said.
More than half of the money included in the report came from requests related to GIS data from the city, Sapp said. The city has to charge for that data, which is used primarily by developers and builders, because the GIS information is licensed by a third-party vendor.
Money collected for open records go into each department’s miscellaneous fund. Sapp said the fund does not have any restrictions on how it can be spent.
Sapp hoped to have a new records portal available for the public by the fall. The new site would feature more public documents for view, called the “Citizen Self-Service.” Sapp said the portal would have more documents related to the city’s financial system.
“The goal is to move away from you even having to make a records request because that data should be on our website.”
