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MSNBC is reporting that Governor Sarah Palin’s office in Alaska quoted a $15 million fee to carry out a government records request from the Associated Press.  The AP asked for copies of all state emails to Palin’s husband, Todd, an oil worker and snowmobile racer who is known to have been included in state policy discussions.

How did the Governor’s office arrive at that figure?  The office figures it’ll take a programmer 6 hours to assemble the emails (presumably recovering them from archives), two hours for “security” checks, and five hours of actually searching through the emails for a given topic.  Multiply that times $73.87 per hour and times the 16,000 full-time state employees in Alaska, and you get $15,364,960.

Hopefully, the AP is pushing back on this, because the number is bullshit.

The Cheaper Way to Do It

First, even if you accept that it takes 6 hours to rebuild archives from backups and various sources, and even if you give the office the benefit of the doubt on the “security” checks (whatever that may entail), it shouldn’t take a programmer 5 hours to run a lexical search.  You start the search and walk away until the results come back.  Perhaps you have to refine the search a few times, but at some point you should have it down pat and the rest should be scripted.

Next, you don’t need to search the emails of 16,000 employees.  Assuming the office’s IT staff kept their SMTP log files, one could run a search on them to develop a list of people who traded emails with Todd — all without having to go through the emails first.

But realistically, you don’t even need to do that.  Though Todd Palin spent “about 50 percent of his time” in the Governor’s office, it’s not likely that he emailed the majority of those employees.  More likely, he traded most of his emails with Sarah Palin’s staff, the public safety commissioner, and other key state officials.  Provide the office with a list of, say, 200 officials who likely received emails from Todd Palin or sent some to him, and you’ve suddenly cut the cost to under $200,000.

Push the office’s IT staff to admit that they don’t need 5 hours of search time per email account and you can lower the costs even further — to about $120,000.

That the Governor’s office quoted $15 million is either a sign that its IT staff is incompetent and wasting state resources, or that the office staff is trying its damndest to foil legitimate public requests to find out exactly what role Todd Palin played in state affairs.

It’s also a sign that it’s time to bring government into the modern era.  Increasingly, requests to view the emails of politicians in office will be the way to provide transparency into our government.  It’s time to demand that government offices put in place systems that make it easy to recover and search emails — and that officials be prosecuted for circumventing these systems by using non-government accounts for official business.