how much does it cost

In August, local news outlet Double Sided Media filed a public records request for records about Officer Justin Peckels, which focused on possible misconduct between 2018 and 2026. Pecos has been the subject of community complaints, including punching a resident in the face during traffic stops, making the records critical to oversight and their release clearly in the public interest.

At least 44,816 hours of staff time at a cost of approximately $2,484,599.04. (The outlet filed a separate request for similar records on former police officer Eric Klinko, which resulted in a lower estimate of $195,869.52, bringing the combined total of the two requests to nearly $2.7 million.)

The Pecos archives are either the largest in the world, or city officials intentionally maintain their repository to ensure that the cost of fulfilling public records requests is prohibitive. The city’s response at least points to the latter. Despite the targeted nature of the request, it justified the multimillion-dollar price tag by claiming it could not narrow down the custodians whose records needed to be searched and insisting that the search was necessary all records all City employees past and present.

By that logic, if someone had ever worked for Eugene’s Parks and Recreation Department, their records likely contained sensitive information about police misconduct and would have to be manually extracted and reviewed one by one.

This goes well beyond incompetence. It’s a deliberate effort to create an artificially large—and costly—response to scare journalists into abandoning it altogether.

Typically, agencies are required to search specific custodians who are most likely to have a record of responding, rather than every groundskeeper or clerk on the city’s payroll. If the city had acted in good faith, officials would have asked Two-Sided Media to help them identify the most likely record holders instead of casting a citywide dragnet in the first step themselves.

However, once reporters request public records about the department’s internal accountability processes, the complexity of the technology disappears, and simple keyword searches suddenly become cumbersome.

In 2015, the Department of Defense told FOIA requesters seeking records of tools used to preserve data on seized equipment that fulfilling their requests would take 15 million hours and cost $660 million.

That same year, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration told a requester it would spend $1.46 million to obtain records about the agency’s role in the hunt for Mexican drug cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman.

The list goes on and on.

At the local level, however, these protections break down. While Oregon gives agencies discretion to reduce fees when disclosures would benefit the public, agencies often ignore these provisions.

For a small newsroom like Double Sided Media, an invoice for $2.5 million is effectively a gag order that was never actually intended to cover costs but to coerce the requester into dropping an inquiry (while the Eugene Police Department launched its own “journalism” initiative to document its policing). It also sets a precedent for such chilling tactics being used against any journalist or regulator.

Until then, police departments will likely continue to hand out millions of dollars in ransom for their records — weaponizing the public’s right to know as another avenue for police impunity.