As an actual municipal IT Critter from Massachusetts, I can dump emails in a matter of minutes. However, for a standard public records request, you need to audit by hand each and every email to make sure it doesn't have private information such as personnel records or open contract negotiations in it. That's probably where the cost is. That might be different if it was a subpeona as a judge can just say give us everything, but for standard public records requests, we have to comply with privacy laws. If that's $5k/person, then that doesn't seem reasonable because most users will have little email and nothing with any privacy implications. But for all employees? Or for some big shots like the mayor with thousands of emails? It could be reasonable.

I'm an actual municipal IT critter in Mass, though from a teeny tiny town that barely warrants the one full time IT position I fill. It would be great if the Sec of State could cite this two year rule somewhere in the Mass General Laws or his office's edicts on email retention because all previous guidance from the state has been that email follows the same retention requirements as other documents, which generally means that only official materials like a meeting agenda need to be retained. (The state's guidance also clearly indicated that any retained emails need to be printed out and not retained as email.) The last guidance I saw was also that email was a format, not a document type. You based retention on what was in the contents of the email, not on the basis of it being an email. The other side of that is that almost any sort of actual policy communication in email is not allowed at all because if a majority of committee members communicate in email or any other online format, it constitutes a meeting subject to open meeting laws which means it needs to be formally posted ahead of time. That formal posting, signed by a committee secretary and stamped by the town clerk would be an example of an official document that would have to be retained. But requiring a physical signature guarantees that it isn't applicable to email.

I'm the IT critter for a town in Mass and I manage the online stuff, including mapping. It's possible that the sales of copies are built into the decision about whether or not to update maps, do additional flyovers, and that sort of thing. I don't know about taxes in WV, but here in Mass local government is very very lean, and I can easily see someone in a similar fiscal dilemma deciding that the best way to pay for more frequent updating of mapping (which with flyovers and such is fairly pricey for a small town or county) is by generating revenue from the maps. Particularly as most of the users of mapping are businesses--this doesn't apply quite as much to tax maps, but our GIS layers are pretty expensive to produce and when 90% of your requests for GIS maps are from business who would otherwise need to do the survey work themselves, it's a fine line between public access and corporate welfare.

Also, having possibly out of date maps available in a central archive does kind of worry me. I'd rather have people getting them from us directly. Citizens have a habit of getting the wrong end of a stick on something and storming into town hall irate out of their minds over problems that don't really exist. I've had irate people in my office banging on the counter and screaming waving printouts of some web site somewhere they found that they thought was our official one. Part of managing a municipal website is trying to figure out ways in which information can be presented where citizens will not be confused and assume the worst and where it will be kept accurate and fresh.

Having said that, I agree with most of the people here. These are public records. All our GIS layers are on our website in addition to the ones that are on MassGIS, which includes a viewer. We're adding PDF'd tax maps as of our next update. Our property record cards are available online. I think and our town thinks these are records that should made as widely available as possible. But IMHO that's not the only legitimate way to look at things.