Legal costs and open records requests

In a recent post I discussed the amount of money spent on attorney fees by Laurel County Public Schools in fiscal year 2009.

I was curious as to how much the school district paid their attorney to respond to my request since the response I received was from their legal counsel.  I sent an open records request to obtain this information.  Sure enough, in compliance with the law, I received the invoice sent to the Laurel County Board of Education...

 

I shouldn't be surprised that all other expenses on this document were blacked out, leaving me with the sole $100 charge for responding to my records request.  Regardless, I'm still bothered by two things here...

1. Laurel County Board of Education paid $100 for an attorney to send a 5-page document in the mail.  Really?  $100? It was just a superintendent review (which you can see here), not classified information that needed consultation from an attorney.  Couldn't someone in the superintendent's office or the chairman of the school board fill this request?  Then it would only have cost about 44 cents!
2. This invoice contains 35 line items.  There are only 30 days in June.  I'm not the smartest person but this tells me that Laurel County Board of Education is paying for legal work at least daily if not more. 

Again, I'm not the smartest person in the world, but it seems like school districts could have someone on staff fill these requests rather than forwarding them to attorney's and paying way more than they need to for making copies and dropping a superintendent review in the mail.  In most cases, the superintendents themselves personally responded to my request for the evaluation.

When will we stop wasting money?