After rescinding demands for payment for making copies of 2,500 pages of public records for the V.I. Daily News and providing them for free, the V.I. Public Services Commission claimed Monday the paper could have made its own copies. The Daily News directly contradicted this claim in its past reporting, saying it would have done so if allowed to.

At issue is a V.I. Open Records Act request made in October by the Daily News for a decade’s worth of invoices and other documents concerning the Georgetown Consulting Group. For many years, the PSC has contracted GCG to perform research, technical analyses and reports on the intricacies of V.I. Water and Power Authority finances, rate change requests and other PSC regulatory matters.

The PSC passes the cost for those services on to regulated utilities – and then on to utility customers – through docket specific assessments on those utilities. Although not reflected in the PSC budget, these assessments form a large portion of the real cost of PSC activities and can exceed $1 million annually.

In 2010, for example, the PSC assessed WAPA and its ratepayers $565,000 and Vitelco $689,000 for what it terms "docket specific assessments," totaling $1.3 million for those two utilities that year, according to information provided to the Legislature by PSC Executive Director Keithley Joseph during 2011 budget hearings.

The costs are effectively a transfer from regulated utilities to consulting firms, including GCG, and are ultimately paid by V.I. residents to those utilities through their regular billing. They are mandated by a government agency, but are not part of that agency’s budget.

The V.I. Open Records Act (V.I. Code Title 3, section 881) reads in part that "(e)very citizen of this Territory shall have the right to examine all public records and to copy such records, and the news media may publish such records, unless some other provision of the Code expressly limits such right or requires such records to be kept secret or confidential. The right to copy records shall include the right to make photographs or photographic copies while the records are in the possession of the lawful custodian of the records."

The Daily News requested the information in late October.

The PSC made the copies and informed the Daily News, early in December, that the records were ready but would be not be released until the Daily News paid $622.47 for making the copies.

The Daily News refused to pay and published a series of articles accusing the PSC of violating the open records act by not making the copies available.

On Friday, the PSC turned over the documents free of charge.

On Monday, the Daily News published an article saying it had always been willing to make its own copies, but had not been granted access to the records, which are public.

"From the beginning, The Daily News offered to take our own portable copier and paper to the PSC office and make the copies to expedite the process, to avoid taking up PSC staff time and to eliminate cost to the PSC," Daily News Executive Editor J. Lowe Davis said in that article.

"Our point is that government should not and cannot, under the law, operate a ‘pay to play’ system for fulfilling open records requests. By refusing to allow The Daily News to even look at, much less copy, the documents, the PSC was putting a price on transparency," Davis continued.

Later that day, the PSC issued a statement flatly disputing the Daily News account and requesting an apology and retraction.

"The Daily News did not request access, but rather requested copies of documents. Only once those copies were made did the Daily News refuse to pay the quoted price of $622.75, and instead demand the right to make its own copies," reads the unsigned PSC statement issued by commission spokeswoman Lorna Nichols.

The PSC statement asserts that its public documents "are always available for the general public to review and examine," and claims the Daily News reporter who requested the documents had previously used his own camera to copy documents, but did not request to do so in this case.

It alleges the cost of copying the documents "was staggering," and should not be borne by the regulatory agency.

Reached Tuesday evening, Nichols said the reporter requesting the documents had previously photographed individual documents and had spent several hours on several days with a staff member going over documents.

"We opened it up and were there with him, but we don’t have someone to sit there for four hours a day for weeks on end," Nichols said. After a number of days, staff asked if there were another way to provide the information, Nichols said.

"We said, ‘Please tell us what you need and we will get it for you in some other way,’" she said, adding that the PSC sent the Daily News a letter outlining how copies could be made and delineating the 25-cent fee.

Although Nichols repeatedly stressed that the PSC has no desire to keep any information from the public and regularly provides access to documents at no charge, it was not clear how a member of the public or the press could gain access to a large volume of records, spanning a number of years, in conformity with the V.I. Open Records Act, while not paying a potentially prohibitive sum.

When asked whether or how the entire set of public documents could have been accessed without having to pay a fee, Nichols again said the volume was so large, it was too time consuming for staff to assist for days on end, but stressed the PSC was "never trying to keep anything from the public."

Asked again how the information could be accessed without a cash barrier, Nichols said something could perhaps have been worked out, if that need had been made clear from the beginning.

"If they had said in the beginning, we want to bring in a copier and our own paper, and had raised an issue with paying for copies at the outset, we would have known and the commission could have said, ‘Yes, this is the best way.’ But that was not the case. We told them in a letter it would be 25 cents per page and nothing was brought up (by the Daily News) after that saying they don’t want that, so we went ahead and made copies and billed them."

Perhaps if the PSC implements changes it mentions in its Dec. 31 statement, such snafus and bottlenecks to public access to public information will eventually lessen or disappear.

The statement suggests PSC is "in the process of upgrading its website to help make it even more transparent and user-friendly to the public," and that it is working with the V.I. Public Library system "regarding the availability of all PSC documents."

Currently nominal information about matters before the PSC are listed at the website, under the heading "dockets," but none of the public documents or specific information about the matters under PSC consideration are available online. (See related links below.)