Dr. T. Chaz Stevens

Records Cost Money. So Does Silence. Funding public records requests to the Broward Sheriff's Office. $400 to find out On July 31, 2026, the Broward Sheriff's Office told me it would cost $400 before it answered eight public records requests. Fifty dollars an hour. Eight hours. One determination covering all eight. The same letter says BSO cannot know how many records exist until it starts looking. BSO calculated the burden of records it had not searched for, priced that calculation at $400, and asked me to pay before the searching starts. Three of the eight requests were filed the day before the letter went out. One asks for the status log on a single ticket, a report that lives inside software they already own. Nothing moves until the money moves. Not a denial. A toll booth. All legal … or not? I’m looking into just that. What your money buys Copies at 15 cents a page under § 119.07(4)(a). Certified copies at a dollar. Special service charges under § 119.07(4)(d), the $400 kind. Certified mail with return receipt for pre-suit notice under § 119.12(1)(b). Circuit civil filing fees in the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit. Service of process. Transcripts if this reaches a show cause hearing. And the archive. Every document that comes back gets scanned, indexed, and posted where anyone can read it without asking me. The first $2,500 clears the $400 gate, funds the copy and certified mail costs on the eight pending requests, and covers one circuit filing fee if BSO refuses. That is what finished looks like for this round. If the fight gets bigger, I will say so here, with numbers, before I ask for more. There is no newsroom paying these invoices. No legal department, no grant, no staff. The requests get filed because someone pays the copy fee. The ask $25 covers a certified copy set. $100 covers a pre-suit notice by certified mail with return receipt. $401 covers one circuit civil filing fee. Nothing comes back to you. No perks, no early access, no comped subscriptions. You are buying paper from a sheriff's office that would rather not sell it. You are funding the fight to hold BSO accountable. What the $400 is buying time on Who has a key to the Sheriff's gym. BSO produced 74 pages about access to its training center, then certified that no records exist showing who approved access for anyone who doesn't work there. Two possibilities. Either no outsider ever got a credential, which a single badge would disprove, or credentials were issued and nobody wrote anything down. There is no third answer. Deficiency disputed. R533397-030926. The life of a single ticket. Every hand a request passed through, every date it changed state, every name attached. If an agency slow-walks records, the slow-walk leaves fingerprints. Assigned. R569252-073026. Also open: two complaints before the Florida Commission on Ethics, docketed as No. 26-174, and a referral to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. One of those complaints concerns a retired BSO captain whose post-employment health benefits were cut off after he took a city job the Sheriff didn't like. The Sun Sentinel reported on September 6, 2025 that he has two children with special needs. Whatever the record eventually shows, that is what a records fight is about. Somebody's insurance. Why I'm the one asking Florida passed a law letting any person challenge any book in any public school. Plain language, Statute 1006.28. So I filed the same challenge in all 63 districts: remove the Bible. Not anti-religion. Pro-consistency. The DeSantis administration rewrote the law and named me personally as the reason. I didn't write HB 1467. I used it, exactly as written. Broward County permitted religious banners in schools. Neutral, nonpartisan, community use. I filed for a Satanic Temple display on the same form. Every banner came down countywide in 28 days. Courts call that mootness. They saw the process server and discovered a constitutional principle they had somehow missed for years. I'll take it. In Deerfield Beach, documents I pulled fed the record behind [DISPOSITION] against Al Capellini, Steve Gonot, and Sylvia Poitier. No informants. No leaks. Requests, invoices, and calendars. Somebody signed something. Somebody has to produce it. Transparency I audit agencies for a living. It would be strange not to audit myself in public. What happens to the records Every record produced gets published. Every denial gets published. Every fee letter gets published, including the ones that make me look wrong. If BSO produces nothing, that gets published too. I draw in pen and ink, where the white of the paper does as much work as the line. An agency that certifies no records exist has made a statement it has to live with. The absence of a record is a finding. Disclosure This is a personal fundraiser. Donations are gifts. They are not tax deductible and I am not a nonprofit. I have run for office in Deerfield Beach. I have been (twice) a housing commissioner in town. I have been a party in litigation involving people named in this work. That disclosure appears in my filings and it appears here, above the donate button, where it belongs. BSO's Custodian of Records, Erin Foley, set the price at $400 and eight hours. The meter is open-ended. Foley reserved the right to issue a revised estimate when those hours run out. Chip in what a copy set costs. Then watch what shows up. Press play. Tick.

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