quote:
4. University of Georgia
USA TODAY emailed questions to Gregory Trevor, Georgia's associate vice president for communications, in April 2021. He did not respond. Trevor and two other communications officials, Sara Freeland and James Hataway, ignored a subsequent email in June 2021. Subsequent emails to Trevor, Hataway and two more communications officials, Kathy Pharr and Rod Guajardo, in June and July 2022 were also ignored.

The news organization filed a public records request for the information in June 2021. Georgia's open records office declined the request that July, saying it was not required to create records that do not exist. USA TODAY filed another request later that month for only the sanction information over a partial time period, 2016 to present. The office said gathering and reviewing the records would take more than 200 hours of staff time and it would charge $7,590 to complete the task.

The GA open records law does not require the creation of documents to satisfy a request. It only requires that existing documents be provided.

GA law also allows for charging for the time it takes to comply with an information request at the lowest hourly rate of a person capable of fulfilling the request plus the cost of any copying, CDs, etc. It's a common practice to inform someone making a request of the estimated cost of fulfilling it so that they can decide whether or not they want to move forward with it if it will be costly.