At the November 23, 2004 BOS meeting the Board of Selectmen reviewed their fee schedule for 2005. One of those fee adjustments included changing the fee for "documents not readily available in the office" from $25/hr to $50/hr. They based the fee on what Carla Chiles' law office would charge for her paralegal services, to which she replied "$200/hr." This is of course, an absolutely ridiculous parallel to what Merinel Williams, our town clerk, who would actually be doing the document retrieval, would make. Let's not forget Colorado State Statues and the open records laws, which state that fees shall be established according to what resources are actually being expended. In other words, the town is prohibited by law from making money for an open records request. Merinel Williams makes $14/hr. (she deserves more), plus benefits, which we will round to $18/hr to prove this next point. Even at time and a half, the cost to the town to cover Merinel's wages would only be $27.00, a far cry from what they are planning to charge at $50/hr.

Now let's not forget why the town even has to store public records at another location - they have no space. Of course this was supposed to be solved back when we got the $50,000 DOLA grant to lease space at the HGI store (alleged visitor center) for our police station, freeing up a whole police office for the public record storage. We paid HGI the $50,000.00, but low and behold, our police never actually used (or uses, the lease appears to be still in effect for another year) the space that was leased and paid for. Further, you have to wonder, when DOLA and other officials are done investigating this, who will be responsible for paying back the grant money to DOLA? Will the town actually retrieve the money back from HGI? Maybe they are trying to recoup the fees in open records requests fees?