Following The Badger Project’s reporting, the Richland Center Police Department and Richland County Sheriff’s Office have discontinued a minimum $25 fee for records, which experts said was illegal.
By Annie Pulley, THE BADGER PROJECT
Days after The Badger Project reported on what experts believe are “clearly illegal” fees for open records requests, the Richland Center Police Department removed a reference to its $25 minimum fee from its website, and Richland County said the sheriff’s office will stop charging the fee “effective immediately.”
Tricia Clements, the county administrator for Richland County, said the county board will work to formally change the sheriff’s policy and requesters will no longer be charged the $25 flat fee.
“We do appreciate it being brought to our attention,” Clements said. “This is something that we are and will be changing.”
When contacted by The Badger Project last week for the first story, Clements said the county would consult with its attorneys. On Oct. 28, she received a memo from attorney Michael Windle explaining the policy was “unlawful.”
“The sheriff’s policy is inconsistent with state statutes,” Windle wrote. “The fault is mine, and I both apologize for failing to address this sooner and thank the organizations that brought the matter to light.”
Wisconsin law says that fees imposed for records requests “may not exceed the actual, necessary and direct cost of reproduction and transcription of record, unless a fee is otherwise specifically established or authorized to be established by law.”
So charging a $25 minimum fee is “clearly a violation of the state’s open records law,” wrote Bill Leuders, the president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council.
Richland County imposed the $25 fee in November 2024. The sheriff’s office consulted with attorneys prior to implementing the policy, Windle’s memo suggests.
“I believe a miscommunication occurred,” Windle wrote to Clements.
Prior to The Badger Project’s reporting, a website for the Richland Center Police Department mirrored the sheriff’s policy. In the days after the initial story, the website’s reference to its $25 minimum fee was removed.
Billy Jones, Richland Center’s police chief, could not be immediately reached for comment.
Quoted in the first story, Jones said last week that he was unaware of state law requiring fees for records requests to be proportionate to the costs of producing the record. He said then that he thinks the time required to find and review the cases and body camera footage requested for redactions is more costly than the $25 fee, however.
“This may be something that needs to be revisited and removed or adjusted,” Jones said about his department’s policy last week. “The requests started to become more than we could handle in a timely manner. As for the state statute,” Jones continued, “I had no idea it existed.”
A guide from the state Department of Justice says printing an electronic record should cost a fraction of a cent per page. The guide also recommends record keepers waive fees associated with copying digital records from one format to another for distribution.
“For some reason, law enforcement agencies tend to have a bad habit of adopting flat fees for record requests, but the law does not allow that,” wrote Tom Kamenick, an attorney and the founder of the Wisconsin Transparency Project, a law firm which practices open records law and often represents The Badger Project in lawsuits. “They have to calculate what their own ‘actual, necessary and direct’ costs are and they can charge no more than that.”
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