“It’s the same bill, different year,” Virginia Mercury reported. “The entire point of it is to reduce FOIA fees, so that the fees that are being charged are actually being used simply to cover the actual costs associated with pursuing FOIA requests in the first place, instead of being used as a deterrent for the public to not pursue FOIA requests.”
“Public documents are public, your tax dollars have already paid for these documents in the first place,” Roem said. “Therefore, you should have the lowest barrier possible to accessing them.”