The city of Eugene, Oregon, has handed a local news outlet called Double Sided Media an invoice for $2,484,599.04 to fulfill a public records request about a single police officer, Justin Peckels, who has been the subject of community complaints including punching a resident during a traffic stop. The city claims processing the request would require 44,816 hours of staff time. A separate request about former officer Eric Klinko drew a $195,869.52 estimate, bringing the combined bill to nearly $2.7 million. The city justified this astronomical figure by claiming it cannot narrow the custodians whose records need searching, despite the request being targeted at a specific officer's misconduct file from 2018 to 2026. Instead, Eugene insists it must manually search all records of all city employees, past and present — meaning a former parks and recreation clerk's files would be pulled and reviewed for police misconduct documents. Standard practice requires agencies to search custodians most likely to hold responsive records, not cast a citywide dragnet. The technology double standard demolishes any good-faith defense. Eugene Police recently signed a two-year, $342,000 contract for nearly 60 AI-powered Flock automated license plate readers — a surveillance system so secretive the ACLU of Oregon had to sue for records about its deployment. The department can deploy sophisticated software to track residents' movements but claims it cannot perform basic keyword searches on its own internal files. The computational illiteracy is performed, not real. This pattern is not unique to Eugene. The Department of Defense once quoted a requester $660 million and 15 million hours for records about data-preservation tools on seized devices. The DEA quoted $1.46 million for El Chapo records. The Army tried to charge $300,000 for military base water contamination test results before public backlash forced a waiver. The tactic is systemic: inflate the cost estimate until the requester cannot pay, then treat the silence as consent. Federal requesters have some protection — recent FOIA amendments strip agencies of most fee authority when they miss response deadlines. At the state and local level, those protections largely vanish. Oregon law grants agencies discretion to reduce fees when disclosure serves the public interest, but agencies routinely ignore these provisions. There is no binding fee cap, no mandatory public-interest waiver for journalists, and no requirement that agencies maintain searchable databases. The structural incentive is clear: police departments control both the records and the cost estimates. There is no independent audit of whether 44,816 hours is a legitimate calculation or a fabricated deterrent. For a small newsroom, the invoice functions identically to a prior restraint on reporting — it doesn't technically ban the story, it simply makes it financially impossible. Meanwhile, Eugene PD has launched its own press initiative to narrate its policing activities, consolidating both the information and the framing under departmental control. Double Sided Media is appealing the fee estimate and should prevail on the merits. But the structural problem persists: without legislative mandates for fee caps, public-interest waivers, and modern records-management software, any police department can replicate this playbook against any journalist or watchdog. The public records system is being turned inside out — designed on paper to enable oversight, weaponized in practice to prevent it.
