Eye on Jacksonville has grumbled on several occasions about the media and the public being fleeced by local government, and now one TV station is complaining about`the problem – finally.

News4Jax said the city set a price of $4,000 on public records the station wanted for a story.

These are public records the city already had produced for someone else.

Why, the station managers asked, should we pay for something you should already have in hand?

We didn’t make copies, city officials said.

This is all nonsense. Over the past 50 years, the media has acquiesced to being charged for what it once got free. Reporters now pay thousands of dollars a year for information that belongs to the people of Jacksonville.

When I covered the police, courts, City Hall and the legislature from 1960-80 I never was charged for public records. Officials would provide them gladly and in timely fashion, even when it took them a few minutes to retrieve.

On one occasion, I got a tip of some skullduggery and went with another reporter, Monroe Campbell, to get records pertaining to the misuse of city property. The city employees hemmed and hawed. Campbell, who had a short fuse, stood up and said loudly, “I want them now or I’m on my way to the state attorney’s office to get a subpoena for them.”

We got the records.

But that attempt to thwart a press inquiry was unusual.

At police headquarters, every accident and offense report was copied and put on a clipboard for reporters to read. Now routine information must be requested and can take days to produce. That’s not conducive to timely reporting.

I was given such full access at police headquarters that one day I was reading handwritten notes of raw data on a clipboard (“Nighthouse Shorty, wanted for a Florida Avenue robbery, has been hanging out at the El Chico on Ashley Street, a CI says….”). A police captain saw me and chewed me out, despite my excuse that no one told me it was off limits. He finally told me I could look, but not to publish any of it.

City officials now hide behind gatekeepers, who unintentionally or otherwise slow and confuse the process.

I was shocked a few years ago when I had to pay the school district $100 for information its computer should have been able to spit out with a few mouse clicks.

So the current process serves two purposes: It provides a steady revenue stream for the city government and school district, and it makes it easier for them to cover up errors or crimes.

News4Jax once was an aggressive news organization. I can’t work up much sympathy for their complaint now when they are complicit in allowing it to reach this point.

Public records should be available at no cost and public employees should be available for questioning. Period.

Here’s an idea: Why not allow the public access to the city’s computer files, with exceptions such as details of ongoing police investigations? Then city employees wouldn’t have to do the work of pulling out specific information and would not need to charge for their labor.