Didn't Expect This: Lieberman Asks Why US Court Documents Aren't Free To The Public (original) (raw)

“Why should my tax dollars be used to facilitate your adoption?”

“and by the way $3000 is a small price to pay in an adoption..”

Obviously you didn’t get my point. I never said anything about your tax dollars paying to facilitate my adoption.

The 3,000.00theywantedwasjustformakingcopiesIwouldneedtofileinadifferentstate(wherewelived).Theactualfilingandcourtfees,etc.fortheadoptionwasabout3,000.00 they wanted was just for making copies I would need to file in a different state (where we lived). The actual filing and court fees, etc. for the adoption was about 3,000.00theywantedwasjustformakingcopiesIwouldneedtofileinadifferentstate(wherewelived).Theactualfilingandcourtfees,etc.fortheadoptionwasabout10,000.00-12,000.

No way in hell should 3 copies of old documents be worth another 25-30% of the entire adoption process.

Now, again, I don’t have a problem paying for hard copies, based on actual costs.

But come on!

I can go to the library and make 1,000 copies for about 10% of that, and actually save money by going to Kinkos and having someone do it for me.

The people necessary to make these duplicates are a filing clerk and notary (many times filled by one person) whose salary is already being paid by taxes. That means they are already being paid to do the work I asked for.

Even if you want to call this “extra” work, how is it that about 15-30 minutes worth of work from a filing clerk and notary is worth $2,700.00.

How many government employees do you know that are worth 5-10 Thousand dollars per hour?

Do you think that is a reasonable fee for an employee being paid by your tax dollars?

Don’t try and throw in the cost of making/typing/preparing the documents either. That was already done with the divorce filing and judgement.

Hell, my local office said they could not believe how much the other county was charging!

And yes, bandwidth and hardware cost money…but they already have those systems in place.

Don’t believe me? Just do a search for any local government office. They all have a web presence.

That means they already have IT people to manage the systems. Oh yeah, and they are already being paid for by, you guessed it, our tax dollars.

The hardware for storing thousands, even millions of documents is a whole lot less than the storage of the same documents in paper. No additional labor is required for someone to make a “copy”.

And, if the systems were set up correctly (which can not be too hard), one local government office could “request” the files be transferred (electronically) from a different office without need of a notary to “prove” that it is an official version of the document.

I would have been happy to pay a reasonable amount for copies. The amount of money they demanded was far, extremely so, from reasonable.

If you still disagree, then you simply can not be reasoned with, and I hope (for your sake as well as everyone else’s) that you never, ever get involved in anything to do with government.