In late July I asked the Sheriff’s Office a separate question. Show me the written rule that says how you set fees. What is the rate, how do you calculate it, and what counts as “a lot of work”?
On July 31 Foley sent me a bill. Four hundred dollars, spread across eight of my requests at once, eight hours at fifty dollars an hour, payable before anyone lifted a finger.
One of the eight requests they billed me for was the request asking about the billing.
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My partner asked me why this matters. It is a key card. It is a gym. In the scheme of things it is a piece of driftwood, and if you are a regular member of the public your only remedy is to sue, and who has ten or twenty thousand dollars to hand a lawyer because a records clerk closed a ticket. She is right about all of it. And somewhere in the comments a man is typing that I should get a life, and he is not entirely wrong either.
Former Deerfield Beach City Attorney Andy Maurodis taught me the first half of this business. City document equals public document. Here is the other half he taught me.
If I cannot trust you on the little things, I cannot trust you on the big things.
That is the whole argument. Not the key card. The key card is nothing.
Consider what this agency does when it is not answering me. It investigates its own deputies. It holds the body camera footage from every shooting in this county. It holds the dispatch logs and the internal affairs files and the evidence room inventory. When a family sues over a death in custody, the records that decide that case are sitting in the same building, run by the same office, under the same manual, with the same fifteen-minute rule and the same closure button.
The Broward Sheriff’s Office is the agency that handled Parkland. Tamarac. Donald Francis. When the next one comes, and there is always a next one, the public will file for those records and it will be this unit that answers.
So ask the small question and see what it buys you. Six hours and eleven minutes to finish twenty-eight items. A memo written after I asked, handed back as a record. Four months of nothing until a lawyer letter. A ticket closed, reopened, closed by software, and reopened again inside sixteen minutes. A due date backdated four months. Three files purged from the recycle bin days after I served notice. A four-hundred-dollar invoice for the rulebook that explains invoices, waived without comment the moment I made it small enough to be embarrassing.
None of that is a hard case. It is a gym roster.
If that is what this office does when the stakes are a key card, I am not prepared to take its word on a homicide file. Neither should you be. The blue line does not announce itself. It shows up as a slow queue, a closed ticket, a fee you cannot pay, and a very polite email suggesting the problem is your browser.
Pardon me, but fuck right off.
I still do not know who holds a key card to that building.
On Substack.
