Public records in Maine, from the request to the answer

Maine’s Freedom of Access Act is the law that turns the state’s paperwork into something a member of the public can ask for. It has a procedure, and the procedure has numbers in it: how quickly an agency must say it received a request, what it may charge, when it may ask for money up front, and what happens when it says no.

Why the numbers matter more than the principle

Everyone agrees in the abstract that public bodies should be open. What decides whether a request works is narrower: whether the acknowledgement arrived inside the five working days that Title 1, section 408-A sets out, whether the estimate was given, whether the fee charged is the one the statute allows. This folio quotes those figures from the statute itself, read on the Legislature’s website on September 6, 2026.

The figures are short enough to hold in mind: the first two hours of staff time cost nothing, the rate past them may not exceed $25 an hour, copying runs at ten cents a page, and advance payment is allowed only once an estimate passes $100. Each number is printed in the statute; the fee piece sets them beside the lines that carry them.

In what order do the pieces run?

The first piece asks what counts as a public record. Its finding is a gap: the definition of what is public sits on pages the state’s access site does not publish, and the piece reports the gap instead of filling it. The second follows how a request proceeds from the acknowledgement inside five working days to the nonbinding time estimate, with the two free hours and the ten cents a page along the way.

The third sets out what a request costs and when money is asked first, using the figures above. The fourth covers when a request is refused: subsection 4 of section 408-A makes every denial subject to appeal under section 409, so a refusal is not the last word, and the piece separates what the published text gives from what it leaves out.

What this folio does not do

It does not draft requests, review anyone’s correspondence, or say whether a particular refusal was lawful. That is legal work. What this folio can do is show where the published rule is, so that a reader arrives at the question already knowing what the text says.

Every number above can be checked in one place: the Legislature’s website, which publishes the full text of Title 1, section 408-A. A reader who opens it can set the statute beside any figure quoted here and read the lines around it, which is as far as a reference work goes.