How to Search Local Public Records Without Paying a Fee
Our founding fathers declared that government should be "of the people, by the people and for the people." The best way to do that is for government records to be open for public inspection. While the Freedom of Information Act sets forth what records should be open to the public, states have their own laws regarding public records. These laws vary, but they generally set forth that records are public unless the state or municipality can cite a specific exemption, such as health privacy, personnel issues or legal negotiations, to keep them private. Searching these public records without paying a fee is pretty easy to do.
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Instructions
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Check your local newspaper. All states require state and local governments to post what are called legal notices or legal ads in a local general circulation newspaper. Meeting agendas, ballots, bond issue requests and budgets are some of the documents that must be advertised in a newspaper. Newspapers also, as a public service, often publish things such as bankruptcies, divorces, property transactions, and court and police records.
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Check government and business websites. Many states, cities and counties put records online for the public to see for free. These may include crime reports, building permits, meeting agendas, property tax valuations and business incorporation documents. Also there are some private websites, such as WhitePages.com, that offer simple public records, such as phone numbers, for free.
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Go to your local municipal or college library. These institutions may hold copies of government reports and documents that were published. They may also have a historical archive of such records or of newspapers and other publications that have printed various government records over the years.
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Visit your local government or court offices. Although government entities have the right to charge you a fee for making either paper or electronic copies, they must allow you access to inspect public documents. It's possible you may encounter resistance either due to ignorance of the law or because of a disagreement over whether something is a public record. Be sure to study your state's open records law and be able to cite language as to why a record is public. If that doesn't work, be prepared to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get access to the documents.
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Make a request by mail or telephone. If the records you seek are not held locally and you can't or don't want to travel to inspect them in person, you can make a request by mail or over the phone. While a phone call may get you what you want, requests in writing usually work better. Remember, though, that you may have to pay copying and/or postage costs to get the records sent to you.
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Tips & Warnings
There are fee exemptions, usually 2 hours of free search time and 100 free pages of copies, available to news media, educational institutions, scientific institutions and nonprofit organizations. The government's definition of "reasonable fees" may be higher than yours. Get a quote upfront on the charges. If you think the quote is too high, you can request to have the fees lowered or waived altogether.
