Watchdogs of the public’s information — official documents, government e-mails, contracts and salaries — often find themselves in an uncomfortable quandary. What’s the information’s value to the public vs. its cost to those asking for it?

In Alaska, those quandaries have now reached staggering levels. While four-figure tabs aren’t unheard of in any state, including New Mexico, Gov. Sarah Palin’s administration has demanded fees as high as $15 million for news organizations and citizens to look at her state e-mails. That didn’t include the 10-cents-a-page cost for paper copies (the only way to get the information). And it didn’t matter whether the same e-mail accounts had already been reconstructed for a previous requester.

Palin’s administration apparently feels every request deserves the same, repetitive costs of paying taxpayer-funded workers to retrieve taxpayer-funded information about how the taxpayer-funded government works. And with Palin now on the national stage as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, the requests have been pouring in.

Hearing of the Alaska Dilemma, New Mexicans on both sides of the open-records fence found themselves alternately amused and puzzled.

“It’s hard not knowing what their law is,” said Gov. Bill Richardson’s spokesman, Gilbert Gallegos. “It’s not quite clear what the charges are for.”

So far as MSNBC.com investigative reporter Bill Dedman has been able to figure out, this is how the charges worked in a request by The Associated Press for all state e-mails sent to the governor’s husband, Todd Palin:

(H)er office said it would take up to six hours of a programmer’s time to assemble the e-mail of just a single state employee, then another two hours for “security” checks, and finally five hours to search the e-mail for whatever word or topic the requestor is seeking. At $73.87 an hour, that’s $960.31 for a single e-mail account. And there are 16,000 full-time state employees. The cost quoted to the AP: $15,364,960.

Could it happen here? Not likely. New Mexico’s Inspection of Public Records Act allows public agencies to  charge only for the cost of copies within a range of 25 cents a page to $1 a page. The employee cost of compiling them? On the house.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t a drag on the agencies’ time — or that cash-strapped news organizations haven’t had to dig deep. Without knowing precise dates of an e-mail communication, for example, or the pattern of wrongdoing that a reporter suspects, open-records requests are sometimes so broad that the per-page total can easily double or even quadruple the average reporter’s paycheck.

But $15 million? Gallegos said that one ongoing records search has so far consumed about 200 work hours from him and others in the governor’s office. Even at that, the tab has only been about $500 to the requester.

Alaska’s open records act has previously drawn the criticism of the Sunshine Review, a citizen wiki that noted a 2007 study by the Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Better Government Association, which graded it an F. New Mexico fared better, but not well, earning a C-. The study rated states based on:

The procedural criteria measure (1) the amount of time a public agency or department has to respond to a citizen’s request for a public document; (2) the process a citizen must go through to appeal the decision of an agency to deny the request for the public record; and (3) whether an appeal is expedited when it reaches the court system.

The penalty criteria weigh (1) whether the complaining party, upon receiving a favorable judgment in court, is awarded attorney fees and costs; and (2) whether the agency that has wrongfully withheld a record is subject to any civil or criminal punishment.

Among the New Mexico cases that ended up in litigation, the Sunshine Review cited:

Public records lawsuit settled

October 11, 2008: The state Department of Taxation and Revenue has settled a two-year-old public-records case and agreed to pay $117,500 to a private investigator who sued the department for access to the records.

A lawyer for the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government said the settlement amount was the largest ever made in such a case. Read the full article here.

Judge rules in Sandia landfill public records case
October 8, 2008: A state district judge has ruled that a report concerning groundwater monitoring at Sandia National Laboratories’ mixed waste landfill is public record.

The state Environment Department had sued Albuquerque-based advocacy group Citizen Action last fall to keep the report secret. The department cited executive privilege in preventing the disclosure of the 2006 report by TechLaw, a consulting company. Read the full article here.

New Mexico Tech Resorts to Snake Oil
August 17, 2008: New Mexico Tech is an institution widely respected as a purveyor of science and knowledge. So it’s especially sad to see it sink to peddling snake oil as a way to justify its ill-advised refusal to turn over documents in response to a request under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act. Read the full article here.

UNM regents approve public records changes
August 12, 2008: University of New Mexico regents on Tuesday approved changes to the school’s public record policies that will allow employees to opt out of releasing their home addresses and telephone numbers. Read the full article here.

Phil Sisneros, a spokesman for New Mexico Attorney General Gary King, a longtime open-government advocate, said weaknesses in the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act include its blind eye toward electronic records — a weakness King has thus far unsuccessfully sought to shore up in recent legislative sessions.

Chuck Peifer, an Albuquerque lawyer who represents newspaper organizations, said other weaknesses include interpretations of what constitutes a “personnel exemption” that “cloaks it with the file of invisibility.”

“We tend to litigate that a lot,” he said.

Needless to say, paying lawyers to pry open the public’s records also costs money — not only to the plaintiffs trying to find out the citizens’ business but also to the taxpayers who pay the government lawyers trying to keep the records closed.

Nevertheless, Peifer said, “I can’t remember any case where the fee was so high that it effectively chilled the right of someone to see a public record. Normally, we end up negotiating the fee down.”

Not so lucky in Alaska, where newspapers have been as damaged as any other in the nation by declining circulation and advertising profits. As MSNBC reporter Dedman found out, two newspapers reluctantly declined to follow through on their requests when told they’d have to pay $1,250 in one case and $6,500 in another.

Those requests were submitted before Palin went national, and before the national media went to Alaska. Given the similar onslaught that likely would have followed in New Mexico had Richardson gotten Barack Obama’s vice-presidential nod, his staffers can be forgiven a sense of relief at not having to wade through it now.

Relief aside, if they could have figured out how to charge for their time, consider what a dent they would have made in the state’s looming $200 million budget shortfall.