This year, the Saint Louis City Recorder of Deeds office, which oversees real estate licenses, has collected $20,729 in copy charges from people who printed documents from the privacy of their own home or business. The copies didn't involve the use of any of the city's paper or staff time, things for which governments usually charge copy costs.

For copies made by Recorder of Deeds staff, the office charges $3 for the first page and $2 per page for any additional pages.

Online access to the office's database can be purchased, for a minimum of $75 per month. But if a person prints from that database after having purchased access, using a personal computer and printer, the same per-page charges apply.

At first glance, this pricing scheme appears to violate the state's Sunshine Law, which outlines the types of records considered to be public documents and generally limits the copy fees that governmental bodies can charge.

According to state statute, copy costs "... shall not exceed ten cents per page for a paper copy not larger than nine by fourteen inches, with the hourly fee for duplicating time not to exceed the average hourly rate of pay for clerical staff of the public governmental body."

But Daryl Hylton, assistant attorney general at the Missouri Attorney General's office, said that after reviewing state statute, he concluded that the Recorder of Deeds Office can in fact charge for copies it didn't make. The office has a special provision in state law that specifically states the fees the office can charge.

From the statute: "For copying or reproducing any recorded instrument, except surveys and plats: three dollars for the first page and two dollars for each page thereafter."

That provision alone doesn't necessarily allow the office to charge for copying done remotely, but the last line of the Recorder of Deeds' statute does, which states, "for all other use of equipment, personnel services and office space the recorder of deeds shall set attendant fees."

Hylton said that, "equipment" can be interpreted to include copies made on outside equipment, using the office's database.

The copy fees that the office charges bring in a good amount of the office's approximately $2.5 million in annual expenditures. For 2008, the office collected nearly $450,000 from in-office and out-of-office copy fees, according to Donna Michaels, the supervisor of the office's Cashier Department.

This year, the total is down to about $200,000.

Jean Maneke, a prominent Missouri attorney who specializes in Sunshine Law cases, said she hasn't received any complaints about the Recorder of Deeds' copy charge practice.

"I sued over the cost of an assessor's database a few years ago and after some discovery, we agreed on a reasonable fee," she wrote in an email. "That, plus the huge litigation last year over the Dept of Revenue's database, are the only cases I'm aware of which have some comparable issues."

FULL DISCLOSURE: During the course of obtaining data for a Policy Pulse investigative article, the Show-Me Institute was billed $450 in copying charges by the Saint Louis City Recorder of Deeds office, for printing documents from a Show-Me Institute computer to a Show-Me Institute printer.