County record access upheld by court
A superior court has ruled in favor of a Cumberland business that sued a handful of Maine counties over access to their deeds and other land records.
John Simpson, owner of MacImage of Maine LLC, sued the counties in November 2009 for ignoring or denying his requests for land records through the Freedom of Access Act, which he planned to use to set up a statewide database of electronic records. This week, Cumberland County Superior Court ruled that the six counties' fees for copies of deeds and records illegally denied access to public records and violated the Freedom of Access Act, according to a press release from law firm Preti Flaherty, which represents Simpson. The six counties are Androscoggin, Aroostook, Cumberland, Knox, Penobscot and York.
A number of the counties requested hundreds of thousands of dollars to copy their databases; Cumberland County, for example, required Simpson to pay its software vendor $300,000, a price Simpson disputed. The ruling asks the counties to provide Simpson with copies of the records for a reasonable price -- "a few thousand dollars as compared to the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars the counties wanted to charge," lawyer Sigmund Schutz said in the release.
The counties have 10 days from Feb. 22 to file an appeal. Bryan Dench, a lawyer for Androscoggin County, said the ruling will have "a very significant fiscal impact," according to the Sun Journal. "We're just trying to be fair to the taxpayers who underwrote the cost of creating these valuable records," he said.
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