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The county first denied the newspapers' May 14 request days after the General Assembly passed a law making such information available to the public. Beaufort County attorney Ladson Howell said that by his reading of the new law, the request could be fulfilled only by court order. He said in an e-mail he would request an opinion from state Attorney General Henry McMaster.
But on June 3, a week after a discussion with the newspapers' editors about the impasse, Howell said records would be provided.
Thursday, he sent summary response times for the county's nine EMS stations. The times represented the averages from 2006 to the present. To obtain data to support those averages, however, Howell indicated the county would charge about $33,000 for compiling 7,000 pages of ambulance trip reports and manually redact information not subject to the state's Freedom of Information Act, according to an e-mail Thursday from Howell. State Sen. Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee, who sponsored an amendment to a 2004 law to make such information available to the public, reacted strongly to the fee.
"When did they move an insane asylum into the Beaufort County administration building?" Peeler wrote by e-mail. "The public's right to know should never have such a punitive cost."
In their most recent request, the newspapers asked to review county EMS records "collected, compiled by or in the possession of the county or its agents" documenting response times of county EMS from Jan. 1, 2006, to the present. The newspaper did not specifically request individual trip reports.
The newspapers also asked to see any documentation, analysis, feasibility study or comparison examining county EMS response times in southern Beaufort County.
The county's projected cost to fulfill the newspapers' request was estimated to be about $4,500 for copies and $534.80 for labor to compile the data. Possible additional costs include $27,071.50 in "potential delayed revenue" that could result from county staff being pulled off their regular work to compile the data, said EMS director Donna Ownby.The county's projected cost also included 40 hours of overtime county staff might have to work to "catch up" on time lost working on the newspapers' request, according to the EMS department.
Ownby, however, said she was optimistic that the total cost for gathering the data would not exceed $5,050.
"We would have to take the secretary away from her regular job, which is billing, and she would have to do this instead," she said. "But we would not charge for lost revenue or time unless pulling the data took an unexpected amount of time. And we would alert (newspaper staff) to that ahead of time."
