What you can be charged
A fee is allowed. A fee used to make you go away is not. Here is the difference.
The rule
Under Chapter 42 a municipality may charge the actual cost of reproduction. It may not charge for the time spent deciding whether to release the record, for legal review, or for the inconvenience of being asked.
Search and retrieval time may be charged only where the request requires substantial staff time, and the municipality must give you an estimate before incurring the cost.
In practice
Usually chargeable
Paper copies at actual per-page cost. Postage. A storage device if you asked for one. Staff time above the substantial-effort threshold, if estimated in advance.
Not chargeable
Emailing a file that already exists electronically. Time spent on legal review or redaction decisions. Inspecting a record in person during office hours. A fee for making the request at all.
If the estimate looks wrong
1. Ask for it in writing, itemised
“Please break the estimate down by copy cost and staff time, and tell me the hourly rate and whose time it is.” A defensible estimate survives that question easily.
2. Narrow the request
Most large estimates come from a broad request rather than an obstinate clerk. A date range or a named document often takes a $400 estimate to nothing.
3. Ask for electronic copies
If the record exists electronically, per-page copy charges should not apply. This is the single most effective sentence in a fee dispute.
4. Ask who set the fee
Fee schedules are usually adopted by the governing body, not by the clerk. If the schedule itself is the problem, the clerk cannot fix it and the council can.
A note on good faith
Most clerks are not trying to price you out.
In a town with one full-time employee, forty hours of searching is genuinely forty hours that nothing else gets done. An estimate that looks punitive is more often a signal that the request is broader than you meant it to be.
Ask what would make it cheaper. It is a question clerks are pleased to be asked and can usually answer in a sentence.