StenehjemWayne445Bismarck  (CSi) North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenjehem has found that the City of Cooperstown didn’t violate the Open Records Law by charging excessive fees for copies of requested records  for the time it took to locate records.

Stenejhem’s findings come after a May 12th incident when Ron Dahl requested a copy of “all the meeting minutes” of the Cooperstown renaissance Zone Committee along with “all the applications, both those approved and disapproved.”

The Cooperstown City Auditor gathered meeting minutes and explained that since the creation of the committee, the meeting minutes had been filed by individual projects, causing her to search through 19 paper files on numerous projects. The auditor informed Dahl that he would be billed for the records and it was explained that the process to find the records was difficult. Dahl requested an opinion.