Boulder County Commissioners Ben Pearlman and Cindy Domenico approved a resolution adopting that new policy Tuesday. Commissioner Will Toor was absent.

“It’s an administrative issue,” Pearlman said after Tuesday’s meeting.

Pearlman said the new hourly charge “brings us into line with what other counties are doing” to cover the expenses of the time-consuming staff work needed to handle a sweeping open-records request.

Tuesday’s resolution says the board “finds that a charge of $30 per hour is reasonable and the minimum necessary to cover excess staff research and response time to produce voluminous records in response to a public records inspection and/or copying demand.”

However, neither that resolution nor the new provision defines such terms as “voluminous” or “excess staff research and response time.”

Pearlman, Domenico and county attorney Larry Hoyt did not discuss the resolution and new policy provision during Tuesday morning’s regular business meeting before the two commissioners voted to adopt it.

The commissioners confirmed afterward, however, that they’d discussed the potential legal ramifications of the proposed revision during a recent executive session with the county attorney.

Domenico also said the proposed policy change had been discussed publicly with Boulder County’s elected and appointed department heads during a public meeting.

After Tuesday morning’s meeting, Pearlman said that “we’ve had a lot of problems” with the time-consuming nature of some open-records demands.

Hoyt said that sometimes the requests are overly broad or vague, such as someone seeking “all documents related to all SPRs” — the site-plan reviews the Boulder County Land Use Code requires for many development applications.

As many as 25 to 30 staffers might be needed to respond to such a request, Hoyt said.

He said it’s also become increasingly common in some jurisdictions for lawyers to use open-records requests “to ask for every document on a topic” while preparing a potential lawsuit against the local government agency.

Pearlman said that in some cases, the people who made the requests don’t even come back to examine or get copies of the materials the staff has assembled.

Pearlman, however, cited no examples of specific instances of such open-records requests, who made them or the time it took to comply with them.

Hoyt said later Tuesday that he’ll review logs of open-records requests for 2008 and 2009 for any confidentiality constraints before releasing that information later this week.

Hoyt said decisions about whether to impose the hourly $30 charge would be made on a case-by-case basis.

A part of the existing public-records policy that was unchanged by Tuesday’s commissioners’ action is the fee of 25 cents per page the county can charge for copies, printouts or photographs of public records.