LEHI — Anyone who wants to make a Government Records Access Management Act, or GRAMA, request in Lehi will have to pony up some money.

The Lehi City Council has adopted an ordinance to charge higher prices for GRAMA requests. The ordinance gives specific hourly rates for certain departments and stipulates that if the request requires the city to use a contractor, the person requesting the information must pay the rate the contractor charges the city.

The city contracts out for several offices, including the city attorney and for information technology personnel, said Ken Rushton, Lehi city attorney. When people request city e-mails, the city hires an IT company to retrieve those, which costs the city extra. Other fees under the ordinance would include charging $50 per hour if a department head helps to access the information, $40 per hour for supervisory staff, $30 per hour for professional staff and $20 per hour for support staff.

The state GRAMA law doesn't specifically stipulate what cities can charge for GRAMA requests, but it does say that if the request requires staff time to retrieve the record, the hourly fee to the person who made the request cannot exceed "the salary of the lowest-paid employee that has the skill and training to do it." The law also says the first 15 minutes must be free, which the Lehi ordinance also specifies.

A media attorney says payment stipulations are included in the law so public individuals can obtain the records they want.

"(It's) not to make the costs so prohibitive to deny access to records," said Jeff Hunt, a Salt Lake attorney who specializes in media law. "We actually all own these records, the government just holds them in trust for us. Hopefully they won't make it too expensive that the public can't see its own records."

Rushton, Lehi's attorney, advised the City Council to create a fee schedule because the city recorder's office was recently inundated with requests. He told the Deseret Morning News the taxpayers shouldn't have to bear the burden because the majority of them don't make the requests.

A freedom of information advocate disagreed.

"If you carry that logic out then we could say the taxpayers shouldn't have to bear the burden of city council salaries because 70 percent of city council business is (making decisions) about developers, so the developers should have to pay those salaries," said Ed Carter, an attorney and journalism professor at Brigham Young University. "Most taxpayers don't use all the services the city provides."

He also said that providing the information is part of a city employee's job.

"They don't seem to see the GRAMA law as very important," he said. "It seems they consider it to be outside the regular business the government is doing, but it's essential to what the government does, servicing the public even if only a small number of people are using that government service."

---

E-mail: csmith@desnews.com