Metro must have at least one such position, because the public transit system’s Associate General Counsel Sonia Bacchus told us in an Aug. 18 letter that it would cost $31,000 to pay somebody to copy 5,135 pages of contract documents requested recently by The Washington Examiner.
Bacchus estimated it will take 435 hours to finish the job, or $71 an hour. Multiply by the standard 2,005 hours of a work-year and you get an annual salary a few pennies short of $143,000. Not bad for standing in front of a copying machine all day for two and a half months.
But wait, there’s more! If the $143,000 position is, unhappily, already filled when you apply, there appears to be another copying position at Metro that may interest you. Bacchus estimated that 15.5 hours of labor would be required to copy other documents requested bythis newspaper, at a total cost of $600. That comes to $38.70 per hour, or $77,612 annually. Again, not bad pay for pushing the go button on a copying machine.
Not only is Bacchus a whiz on calculating personnel and copying costs, she also made it clear in her Aug. 18 letter that she is quite capable of determining whether forthcoming news stories “will contribute significantly to the public’s understanding of the operations or activities” of Metro. If she weren’t thus qualified, we’re sure her letter would not have contained a sentence that left us completely anaudic. There, Bacchus denied The Examiner’s request for a fee waiver, saying “your statement that your request is in the public interest is conclusory in nature and does not provide a sufficient basis to grant a fee waiver.”
Silly us for thinking it self-evident that helping taxpayers learn how much Metro pays its employees and which ones it promotes, as well as who Metro enters into contracts with and for what purposes, would help the public better understand the transit system’s “operations or activities.” Obviously, we were wrong.
It’s also tempting to conclude based on Bacchus’ letter that we were wrong in thinking Metro’s Public Access to Records policy statement that “official public records will be made available to the public … to the greatest extent possible” actually means what it says. We prefer to believe that more reasonable folks are in charge at Metro, and we will seek them out.
In the meantime, we would suggest that Bacchus — and similarly minded public employees everywhere — ought to come down from their high horses, at least once in a while. Or would that be another conclusory statement?
