Overview

Calculation of fees 

Connecticut General Statutes require the State of Connecticut Department of Administrative Services, Bureau of Enterprise Systems and Technology to, “provide guidelines to agencies regarding the calculation of the fees charged for copies of computer-stored public records.”

• Please read the BEST Guidelines regarding calculation of fees for computer-stored records under the Freedom of Information (FOIA).

Guidelines for public access to computer-stored records (Sec 1.211(c).)

Agencies should ensure decisions about new computer system development, whatever the cost and scope, carefully weigh the public interest in making subject information available to the general public under FOI conveniently and at a reasonable cost.

To ensure availability and lowest cost over the life of the application, the agency or entity should identify in the planning process preceding the acquisition the following characteristics of the proposed application:

1. Ability to access, manipulate and report data currently available in any applications which are being replaced with a minimum of “translation” or modification of tables, parameters, or other factors;
2. Clear identification of that information in the database which is not exempt from FOIA;
3. Use of separate tables for exempt and non-exempt data;
4. Use of a database which allows security at a field level;
5. Use of non-proprietary data structures and reporting tools;
6. Data “backups” which ensure availability, including catastrophic loss of primary data, disaster or business interruption;
7. Permanent copies of data stored on optical or other non-destructible media where possible;
8. Compliance with any applicable standards-setting body for data creation, data sharing, management or communication in the field;
9. (State Agencies Only) Compliance with current State of Connecticut Department of Administrative Services, Bureau of Enterprise Systems and Technology Enterprise Wide Technology Standards;
10. Source code ownership by the municipality or the State of Connecticut and source code escrow by the vendor

 

These considerations should be incorporated into any Requests for Proposals, Invitations to Bid or Requests for Information as Evaluation Criteria to ensure that they are known and understood by responding vendors as they develop their proposals or bids.

Discussion

In general, application development best practices mandate consideration of the current and future cost and complexity of retrieving stored data for agency and peer use. They also ensure that data which is being stored will continue to be available even if the vendor of the software or the software modifier is no longer available or engaged in business. It is an additional benefit that these principles also support the mandate that records stored in state systems must be available to the public unless specifically exempted.