A Texas city wants $2.3 million before it will hand over records on its Flock license-plate camera system.
North Richland Hills, a Fort Worth suburb, told the Texas Privacy Coalition that fulfilling its public records request would cost $2.3 million. City officials said searching roughly a terabyte of communications about Flock errors, misuse, and effectiveness would take about 14 years of labor at $15 an hour. The arithmetic does not hold up: 14 years of full-time work at that wage comes to somewhere around $420,000 to $440,000, not $2.3 million. Reaching the city's actual number would require closer to 50 to 70 years of labor at $15 an hour. Phil Mynona, who filed the request under a pseudonym on behalf of the group, called the fee "ludicrous" and said it looks designed to stifle the search, according to the Texas Tribune.
This fits a pattern. As bipartisan unease about Flock's automated license-plate readers grows, some cities are leaning on records fees instead of substantive answers, charging tens of thousands or even millions of dollars just to see how police are using the cameras. A fee that is also mathematically wrong looks less like honest cost recovery and more like a number picked to make the request disappear.
Public records laws exist so citizens can check government tools, not so a bad multiplication problem can do the gatekeeping instead.