Community Transit has started charging fees on public records requests tied to an active federal civil rights case it is a defendant in. Forty-four dollars, give or take, depending on the request. The invoice arrives on agency letterhead, itemized, professional, the way an agency invoices for things it's entitled to invoice for.

Here is the part that doesn't fit on the invoice.

This same agency is paying a contractor $1,644,084.75 across nine years of purchase orders for video production work — a contractor who happens to share a household with one of the agency's own senior officials. This same agency runs an automated scraping operation against a blog that writes about its own conduct, in escalating bursts, from a rotating cast of data-center IP ranges, several times a week. Somebody is paying for that infrastructure too. Nobody invoiced themselves for it.

So the math here isn't really about forty-four dollars. It's about which kind of paper trail gets billed and which kind gets buried in overhead.