No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

In AGO 2006-30, the Attorney General endorsed an innovative response to a public records request: instead of making paper copies of voluminous records, the City of Panama City created a static web page to which it uploaded all of the requested records. The costs of doing so were substantially less than what it would have cost the requester for paper copies. Both the requester and the City agreed to this process and, apparently, both were pleased with the outcome.

Alas, no good deed goes unpunished. The Mayor complained about this process because the static web page set up for the requester was not "available to the public at large." This, of course, is absurd. Had the City provided paper copies of the records to the requester, those paper copies would not have been "available to the public at large" because they would have been delivered to the requesting party. If another party requests the same records, what that party gets is separate copies of the documents, not the copies that were already provided to the first requester. Presumably, had the City received another request for the same records in this matter, it could and would have either given the second requester access to the static web page or created another web page to satisfy the second request.

The Attorney General properly rejected the Mayor's spurious complaint and opined that this innovative method of responding to a voluminous records request was fully consistent with the intent and purposes of the Public Records Law.