Public records
What counts as a public record in Maine
Maine's access statute fixes the numbers: five working days, two free hours of staff time, ten cents a page. The definition of what is public sits on pages the state's access site does not publish.
Title 1, section 408-A of the Maine Revised Statutes, read on the Legislature's website on September 6, 2026, is titled "Public records available for inspection and copying", and the title does quiet work: the section governs how an agency must let a record be seen and copied, not which records the term "public record" covers in the first place. What counts as a public record in Maine therefore has two halves, the broad right of access the state describes in words, and the numbered procedure the statute attaches to every record that qualifies. This article reads both, and marks the exact points where the published pages run out.
A broad right, stated in the state's own words
The State of Maine's Freedom of Access Act page, read on September 6, 2026, describes the right in two sentences of its own. The Act, it says, "grants the people of this state a broad right of access to public records while protecting legitimate governmental interests and the privacy rights of individual citizens", and it "ensures the accountability of the government to the citizens of the state by requiring public access to the meetings of public bodies". Access is thus described as broad, and in the same breath as two limits, governmental interest and personal privacy, which is the balance the whole subject turns on. The same page does not publish the statutory citation, the definitions, the rules on who may request, or the Ombudsman's powers. A reader who arrives there looking for the boundary line is told the line exists and is not shown it.
Two clocks, one of them unnumbered
The procedure sits in Title 1, section 408-A, subsection 3, read on the Legislature's website on September 6, 2026, and it runs two clocks. The first is exact: the agency or official must acknowledge receipt "within 5 working days of receiving the request". The second is deliberately unnumbered: "within a reasonable time of receiving the request", the agency or official must provide a "good faith, nonbinding estimate of the time frame". Nonbinding is the term of art worth slowing down for; it means the estimate is offered in good faith but does not fix the agency to the figure it gives. "Working days" is the phrase the statute uses, and the pages read on that date do not define it beyond those two words. How a file moves from acknowledgement to delivery is traced, step by step, in the folio on how a request proceeds.
What can an agency charge for the first two hours?
The money rules sit in subsection 8 of the same section, read on September 6, 2026. Paragraph B provides that "the agency or official may not charge a fee for the first 2 hours of staff time per request", and that beyond those hours it "may charge a fee of not more than $25 per hour". Paragraph A caps copying at "no more than 10 cents per page for a standard 8 1/2 inches by 11 inches black and white copy". The published figures, side by side:
| What the request draws on | What section 408-A allows | Where the rule sits |
|---|---|---|
| First 2 hours of staff time | No fee | Subsection 8, paragraph B |
| Staff time after 2 hours | Not more than $25 per hour | Subsection 8, paragraph B |
| A black and white copy, 8 1/2 by 11 inches | Not more than 10 cents per page | Subsection 8, paragraph A |
$100, the line where payment goes first
Subsection 10, paragraph A of the same statute, read on September 6, 2026, allows payment to be required in advance when "the estimated total cost exceeds $100". The verb is doing work: a total that lands exactly on one hundred dollars does not exceed it. The threshold also joins two provisions that never mention each other, since the estimate subsection 3 requires is what makes an estimated total, and so the advance payment question, visible before work begins. One consequence of the nonbinding label is structural: the $100 line is measured against a figure the statute itself declines to hold anyone to. The folio on what a request may cost works through the two halves together.
What happens when the answer is no?
Subsection 4 makes a denial "subject to appeal as provided in section 409". A refusal is therefore not the end of the paper trail; it is a formal act that the statute attaches to a named further section, which means a refusal arrives carrying its own address in the law. The pages read on September 6, 2026 name section 409 as the route and stop there, and this article stops with them: what that section provides is not in them, and a reference text does not paste in what its sources do not print. What can be said is structural, that the same statute which numbers an agency's deadlines also numbers the way out of its refusal. The folio on when a request is refused follows that route as far as the published record reaches.
A boundary the pages read do not draw
Which returns to the question this article opened with. Neither page read here publishes the definitions, so the exact boundary of what counts is not stated in either of them; what is stated is the balance, broad access against governmental interest and personal privacy, and the numbered procedure that applies once a record qualifies. The Legislature's page for section 408-A, read on September 6, 2026, does publish the means of going further: the section offered as a PDF and as an MS-Word file, beside navigation marked "Statute Search", "Ch. 13 Contents", "Title 1 Contents" and "List of Titles".
The gesture is small and complete: the Legislature's page for Title 1, section 408-A carries the five working days, the two free hours and the ten cents in the official text, and the "Ch. 13 Contents" link leads through the neighboring sections to the definition of the record itself, which this page, honestly, cannot give.