From the Legal Hotline (1-877-NEWS-LAW)
Q. Question from a city-hall meeting regular: our city added a sign-in sheet in the first-floor lobby to attend council meetings and workshops, held in the council chambers on the second floor, a month or so ago. Today, the police required an ID to go upstairs to attend the workshop meeting. She was told she had to have a driver’s license or passport. She declined out of principle. They then said they could not let her attend the meeting or go through the metal detector. She said she was told she was “not going to go upstairs without an ID.” She was told council changed the rules, but they are not posted. After we questioned the legality of this, they reversed themselves, and said an id was not required. Any thoughts on this issue?
A. The city made the right decision when they reversed their decision on identification. A city may not require persons (e.g., a reporter) wishing to attend public meetings to provide identification as a condition of attendance. On the other hand, they can impose certain security measures on members of the public entering a public building, such as requiring the public to go through metal detectors. See AGO 05-13.
Q. We could use your thoughts on a current issue with a long-time advertiser. In summary, this customer has been advertising with us for quite a few years. Always paid his bills until recently. He now owes us several thousand dollars, and he’s trying to dispute the amount owed in addition to claiming we owe him for ads he’s already paid for. We do not have signed contracts that show he approved the ads.
We’ve audited his account to be sure all charges are correct. He claims he did not approve the ads, and, citing Florida consumer protection law, disputes the balance and says he will seek recovery of his “overpayment.” Can he do this? It seems to me he scheduled the ads, gave us ad copy and paid for them so how can he say they weren’t approved?
A. The law he cites, s. 559.72, prohibits a range of deceptive tactics in consumer debt collection. For example, a collector cannot advertise or threaten to advertise the sale of a debt as a means of forcing payment or misrepresent the amount of the debt or threaten to enforce a debt when such person knows that the debt is not legitimate. However, I don’t see the law directly addressing the practice of billing or attempting to collect for unapproved advertising itself. In other words, I don’t think he can use that section to void legitimate charges for advertising services by simply saying there was no formal “approval” or “signed agreement authorizing those ads.”
Q. Can a government entity charge an “extensive services” fee for records already released?
Details: Our county school district imposes a cost for public records deemed “extensive,” charging for the cost of retrieving, reading, redacting, producing, etc. We understand this is permissible. The question is, can the district–or any government entity–assess “extensive” costs to every party requesting a record that has gone through the process because “No one gets a public record for free because someone else already paid for it?”
Or are the released documents public records themselves, in which case it’s an electronic forward and not a request requiring extensive effort? (In this case, the district has processed and released three administrative investigative files in answer to a public records request, finding the cost to be $42 per record. That has now become the “price” for the records no matter how many times they are requested and released.)
A. Sam was out of the country when this question arose, but Jim Lake at Thomas LoCicero provided this excellent response:
There is language in the public records law that indicates a second requester should not have to pay the special service charge. Florida Statute Section 119.07(4)(d) provides that the special service charge, which is the fee we’re talking about, “shall be reasonable and shall be based on the cost incurred for such extensive use of information technology resources or the labor cost of the personnel providing the service that is actually incurred by the agency or attributable to the agency for the clerical and supervisory assistance required, or both.” The cost of records to a second requester is not actually incurred by the agency, and making the requester pay for work that has already been done is not reasonable.
The Attorney General’s Office in a formal opinion has said that “provision of access to public records is a statutory duty imposed by the Legislature upon all records custodians and should not generally be considered a revenue-generating operation.” So, for example, agencies are not entitled to charge requesters for costs incurred creating original records that the requester wants to copy. That’s essentially what the district is doing here.