Johnson County Community College is being sued by the Student Press Law Center and a college journalist for charging $24,130.72 in fees in order to release open records. JCCC is charging $10,000 to produce a day’s worth of emails. The lawsuit states that the amount that is being charged for the records is excessive. “They’re basically hanging a price tag on what should be public documents in order to keep those documents from being public,” Attorney Christopher Grenz said. Under The Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, the public is ensured public access to U.S government records. For the records to be released, the agency must receive a written request, thus causing the agency to be required to disclose the information unless the information can be withheld from disclosure under one of the nine exceptions in the FOIA. Reasonable fees can be charged for the information that is being requested, but Johnson County is asking for a fee that its college newspaper certainly cannot pay. The fees charged for the emails in question is unreasonable, especially because the newspaper was only trying to run a story to inform their student body about the closing of a department on their campus. It is understandable that Johnson County wants to charge a fee for information because time will be spent looking for the emails in question, but the price tag that has been put on said emails only makes it look like Johnson County is hiding something that the college doesn’t want the campus and the community around them to know. The fees charged for information should be reasonable to the information that is requested. Emails are not that hard to get ahold of in a short period of time, therefore the fees charged should be more accessible. Agencies may be using the fees as a way to block information from being released to the public. “We’re seeing this phenomenon all over the country, where agencies are ringing up these jackpot bills for records, and it seems like public watchdogs are being seen as an easy way for an agency in a budget crunch to turn a quick buck. Public records belong to the public, and there’s not supposed to be a mark-up so that agencies can make a windfall profit by selling the public’s own information back to us,” Frank LoMonte, SPLC executive director, said. The fees should be a way that the agency justifies the time and effort that was put into providing the information to the public, not as a cop-out to not provide information that is accessible to the public under the open records act. Thomas Jefferson once stated that “Information is the currency of democracy,” but now you need currency in order to access information that should be accessible to the public. If newspapers and reporters do not have access to information, who will inform the public the information that they have a right to know?