From the Editors: The one way New Jersey is five times better than Pa. on transparency

This editorial is authored as part of Sunshine Week, a time when journalists, news outlets, citizens and more, highlight the importance of transparency in government.

For many reasons, Pennsylvanians can be proud of the Right to Know Law, the statute that empowers citizens and journalists to get documents from commonwealth agencies, as well as other smaller governments like counties, municipalities, and school boards.

For example, the creation of the Office of Open Records to adjudicate disputes between a requester and a government is truly a revolutionary invention that few other states can match.

As is the case with any open records law, however, there are areas where major improvements are needed, like the ridiculous 30-day waiting period. And there are also issues of housekeeping, and photocopying costs are one such issue.

Currently, under Pennsylvania law, a government can charge $0.25 per page for black and white photocopies. Perhaps this cost made sense when the RTK was passed in 2009, but no longer.

Go across the river into New Jersey and make an open records request that also requires photocopies, and you’ll only be charged $0.05 cents per page.

Think about that! Pennsylvania is charging five times more to obtain physical copies of records about its governments than New Jersey.

“Well, who actually asks for photocopies these days?” someone might honestly object. “Everything is digital.”

Good governments in the commonwealth are usually good about providing documents in digital format when requested that way. But still, the quarter-per-page fee can be onerous in other ways.

Oftentimes, a requester will only seek to review documents, but those documents need to be redacted of sensitive information before the person can look them over. In these instances, the government will photocopy the pages first, then redact the copies, not the originals. But the catch is, even though the requester is seeking only to review, they must pay for the photocopies in order to aid the redacting process. The fees add up quickly.

Such was the case when Broad + Liberty asked to review dozens of boxes of documents from Upper Darby related to grants from the federal office of Housing and Urban Development. The proposed photocopying fees ran into tens of thousands of dollars.

Granted, when someone needs copies beyond 1,000 pages, the fee drops to $.20, but that’s still a price that’s unfair and prohibitive, effectively pricing out ordinary citizens and even smaller news organizations.

We used the Right to Know law to obtain the photocopier lease agreement for a local county. Because we don’t want to pick on them, there’s no need to say which one. But the lease is instructive. For $324 a month, this county gets 2,000 black and white and 2,000 color copies included per month (not including paper). 

The lease further states that when those page limits are exceeded, the county pays $0.009 cents per page for black and white copies — not even a full penny per page!

Now we’ve hit the heart of things: with today’s technology and prices, a black and white photocopy only costs the government about $0.02 cents per page (if that!), yet they are able to charge citizens a quarter. That’s a scam Tony Soprano would love. The only problem is he’d have to leave New Jersey and come to Pennsylvania to pull it off.

We also asked ChatGPT to give an analysis of the per-page copy cost to customers of FedEx, which bought the self-service photocopying company Kinko’s. Using information online, the analysis looked at a customer price of $0.20 per single-sided black and white copy.

“FedEx makes at least 90 percent profit on a single black-and-white photocopy. Color prints still rake in 70–80 percent margins,” ChatGPT answered back.

“The price is basically the ‘convenience tax’ — you’re paying for 24/7 access and not having to own a printer,” it concluded.

There is no reason governments in Pennsylvania should be charging its citizens a “convenience fee” just because the government is the one that owns or leases the photocopier. Open records laws are not meant to be a profit-generator for the state.

The dirty, poorly kept secret here is governments use this $.25 cost to either deter people from obtaining the records, or they are using it as a means to recoup the agency’s time — even though agencies are expressly forbidden to charge for their time.

Of course, the fee is only a limit, and not a strict mandate. We’re looking for some hero governments who can lead the way and voluntarily lower their photocopying fees without waiting for a mandate from Harrisburg. But state lawmakers and the governor should realize this fee is a ridiculous barrier and should work to lower it.

If nothing else, be guided by state pride. We’re letting New Jersey do better?!