York Twp. bills its own

York Township is charging one of its own for information he has requested on an issue he wants to bring before the board. Some township commissioners have complained about what they deem to be excessive public records requests that take a lot of time and money to fulfill.

I'm really not sure what to make of this. Help me out. Is this turnabout is fair play? Or simply playing by the rules? Or ...

Not incidentally, York Township has followed through on its plan to list people who request records, what they've requested, how much the township says it costs to fill the request, how much the requester paid and so on. It's available on Microsoft Excel spreadsheet* on the township's Web site.

Couple of things I noticed:

• About three-quarters of the 106 requests took 3 hours or less to fulfill (most of those were 2 hours or less)
• the township says it has spent almost $28,000 filling RTK requests and has been paid less than $600
• the highest costs are for legal fees; the township has paid Stock & Leader $13,230.40 in connection with right-to-know request. That's almost half the total cost.

Take a look. What else do you see of interest in the spreadsheet? Note that in the column labeled 'time to fill,' the letters stand for employees' names except the following, according to township manager Elizabeth Heathcote: S&L is Stock & Leader; BIG is Business Information Group, a computer technical group that retrieved e-mails from backup tapes; and Insight, a computer parts & supplies outfit.

*If you don't have Microsoft Excel, I have the numbers in an OpenOffice spreadsheet and will e-mail them to you; just let me know. If you don't have OpenOffice, it's a free, useful download that offers pretty much everything Microsoft Word and Excel offer. You can get it at www.openoffice.org.