Section 1307 of the Right-To-Know Law requires the Office of Open Records to establish a fee structure for commonwealth agencies and local agencies. Section 1310 of the RTKL requires the OOR to review that fee structure every other year.
The OOR has produced a draft update to the Official Fee Structure (PDF) and is accepting public comment on this draft update through August 19, 2016.
To comment, please email FeeReviewOOR@pa.gov or mail your comments to:
Office of Open Records
Commonwealth Keystone Building
400 North Street, 4th Floor
Harrisburg, PA 17120-0225
Comments will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. on Friday, August 19, 2016.
The OOR will review all comments received and will issue a final update to the Official Fee Structure no later than August 31, 2016.
Open Records in Pennsylvania 
As a County Open Records Office, an inordinate amount of time is spent running reports and data for commercial requestors. We are unable to charge a fee for this information, but we incur the cost of technical staff time, administrative staff time and computer equipment usage, for entities that will use the information for a profit. This needs to be addressed, as the number of these types of requests are increasing rapidly.
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Thank you very much for the comment. -Erik
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Tax payers already pay for this information via their taxes and other fees imposed as an operational cost. That includes the salaries/benefits of the employees handling the dispersal of information (which in an efficient system is minimal), the cost of supplies, the building and its contents/maintenance, etc. The idea that fess must be established for every service that is a natural function of government is miserly at best and discriminatory at worst.
I do applaud the caveat that every information request does not need to be in written format. Too many states use policies outlining the citizen’s use of FOIA and other RTK laws as means to diminish government transparency.
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