Carolina Journal recently requested public employee salary data from 40 of North Carolina’s largest counties and municipalities. Our response rate has been good and there’s been general cooperation, with one exception: Union County.
County administrators want to charge CJ $396 for 12 hours of work compiling the records. Even for a scaled-down version of our records request, the county still asked for $264 paid in advance for eight hours of work.
North Carolina’s public records law allows state and local government to levy a “reasonable” special charge for requests that “require extensive use of information technology resources.” However, during my time at CJ, I’ve never run into an entity at any level of government that tried to charge for public records, including in situations that required far more detailed records than simple salary information.
The Union County request is, to put it mildly, an anomaly.
