Four Hundred Clams
BSO charged me a special service fee to read the policy that authorizes special service fees.
On July 31, 2026, Erin Foley, Records Management Liaison Officer for the Broward Sheriff’s Office, sent me a bill for records I had not received.
Four hundred dollars. Eight hours at fifty dollars an hour. Eight separate request numbers, one determination, one figure. Pay first. Then we’ll see.
100% Reader Funded
Everything here is free and stays free. Paying unlocks nothing — no bonus posts, no Discord, no tote bag. It funds the next request: filing fees, certified mail, server time.
The work is the product, and the product ships whether you pay or not.
If you want more of it, here’s the button.
Here is what four hundred dollars buys.
R569252-073026 asks for the status log on a single ticket in BSO’s own public records portal. Not the records. The log. When the ticket opened, when it changed state, when it closed. Foley runs that portal. She is the Director of the Records Bureau. The log is a filtered export from software she administers.
R568209-072526 asks for Policy and Procedure Manual sections 7.4.1 and 7.4.3. I did not guess at those numbers. They are printed on a Fleet Transfer/Assignment form BSO handed me in response to an earlier request. The agency told me the sections exist, by number, on its own paper. Then it charged me to read them.
As Nana would say,
don’t piss on my tennis shoe and tell me it’s raining.
R568211-072526 asks for the written policy establishing BSO’s special service charge, and any written definition the agency applies to the word “extensive.” BSO assessed a special service charge against the request for the policy governing special service charges.
The two that are real
Two of the eight are heavy. On purpose. Some might argue pre-litigation, but no, not me, I’d never say that.
Then again, I just did … in writing, to Foley, in this letter.
R568244-072626 runs twenty-three numbered items back to January 1, 2018, and reaches communications held on personal devices. R569234-073026 covers building access credentials at BSO facilities from January 1, 2021 forward. Multiple buildings. Database exports. Text messages.
That second one asks which credentials admit Holly Tony, who is married to Sheriff Gregory Tony and who is not, on information and belief, a BSO employee.
Those two requests are work. I am not pretending otherwise. That concession is the entire argument.
If R568244 and R569234 consume the eight hours, the other six were assessed at zero and swept in anyway. If the eight hours split evenly across all eight, BSO priced a twenty-three item, eight-year request touching personal phones at sixty minutes.
Both cannot be true. That is not a burden finding. That is a number.
What the statute says
Section 119.07(4)(d), Florida Statutes, permits a special service charge when the nature or volume of the public records requested requires extensive clerical or supervisory assistance. Requested. Singular transaction. The charge attaches to a request, not to a requester, and not to a running total of everything one guy has pending.
The case law here is thin. The cleanest statement against bundling is a dissent by Judge Zehmer in Florida Institutional Legal Services v. Florida Department of Corrections, 579 So. 2d 267, 269 (Fla. 1st DCA 1991), which flagged a charge built on the cumulative effect of numerous requests rather than the time spent on one. A dissent from 1991. Thirty-five years old. That is what there is.
Board of County Commissioners of Highlands County v. Colby, 976 So. 2d 31 (Fla. 2d DCA 2008), goes the county’s way on most of it. Salary and benefits both count toward labor cost. Advance deposits are permitted. I cite it in my letter because it holds what it holds. Highlands County also put a witness on the stand at a show cause hearing and walked through the arithmetic.
BSO has produced no arithmetic. It produced a rate.
In AGO 2000-11, issued February 20, 2000 to Edward A. Dion, then Broward County Attorney, the Attorney General advised that the determination is case by case and that a charge is hard to justify when the personnel doing the work are performing their regular duties at the same time. That opinion was written to Broward County. Not to a stranger. To Broward.
The part that isn’t about four hundred dollars
I can pay it. The records fund is not empty this month, thanks to a very short list of people who do more than talk. Or bleat like a sheep in the background.
You, yes you. You, right there, reading this … I’m talking about you. You have drive around in a $75K Raptor, bitch and moan about things, but won’t support my work?
The estimate is a filter. It sorts requesters into people who can absorb a surprise invoice and people who go away. Most go away. Most people who file a public records request in this state are doing it once, about one thing that happened to them, and a four hundred dollar gate ends that conversation. Nobody writes it down. Nobody appeals it. The record never gets produced and the requester learns what access costs.
Call it a tax on asking.
The money matters, and not because paper is expensive. Paper is fifteen cents a page. Section 119.011(1) defines the actual cost of duplication as material and supplies, and excludes labor and overhead.
The money buys the ability to say no to four hundred dollars and keep filing. It buys the sixth letter after five went unanswered. It buys the position where an agency cannot end the inquiry by making it inconvenient. Every dollar donated is a dollar BSO cannot make disappear by attaching a number to it.
The response letter went out. It concedes the two big requests, severs four narrow ones, and asks BSO to state, in writing, which divisions and which systems other than its own portal must be searched to produce a status log from its own portal.
Every answer to that question is useful to me. That is the design.
Sylvia Poitier was untouchable in this city for thirty years. Everyone knew it. Everyone said it out loud.
Until she wasn’t.
Press play. Tick.
Records work costs money. Filing fees, service, transcripts, and now four hundred dollar invoices for policy manuals. If you want the requests to keep going out, that is what donations do.
Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.