The city of Eugene, Oregon, has responded to a public records request from the local news outlet Double Sided Media with an estimated cost of approximately $2,484,599.04. The request, filed in August, seeks records about police officer Justin Peckels, focusing on potential misconduct between 2018 and 2026. Peckels has been the subject of community complaints, including one for punching a resident in the face during a traffic stop, making the records vital for oversight and clearly in the public interest.
The Eugene Police Department's response claimed that searching for records and processing the request would take at least 44,816 hours of staff time. A separate request for records about former officer Eric Klinko received a far lower estimate of $195,869.52, bringing the combined total to nearly $2.7 million. The city stated that once payment is received, staff will continue processing the request, and that any amount exceeding the payment would have to be paid before records are released.
The city justified the cost by saying it could not narrow the custodians whose records it needed to search, and that it must search all records of all current and former city employees. Critics argue this reasoning is illogical, since agencies are normally expected to search the specific custodians most likely to hold responsive records. They contend the approach appears designed to make the request prohibitively expensive and discourage the journalist from pursuing it.
The critics also point to a double standard. The police department recently signed a two-year $342,000 contract for nearly 60 AI-powered Flock automated license plate readers, a project so secretive that the ACLU of Oregon had to sue the city for records about it. The city's willingness to invest in sophisticated surveillance technology, they argue, contrasts sharply with its claim that simple keyword searches are too cumbersome for accountability records. For small newsrooms, such an invoice could be an insurmountable barrier.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing