I was informed today that my county was going to start charging $5 per page to provide copies of old LOMAs. They used to not charge. Around here, the county is the only record keeper for LOMAs prior to 1999, when FEMA started putting them online. I've seen LOMAs that are 40+ pages long for some large subdivisions that were removed by the developer ... I guess I'll have tell them what two pages I want on those ...
This will become a moot point when this county switches to the new maps, which last I heard was scheduled for 2013, still seems like a violation of Florida's Sunshine laws to charge $5 per page for copies, but they are probably justifying it by saying that their is time in locating the documents.
Just another govt tax so they have more to spend.
why wouldn't you get them for free from the FEMA site?
Because the maps in the county go back to 1984, and FEMA only has LOMAs on their website (for this county, at least) after 1999. Prior to 1999, it was FEMA's policy not to keep LOMA records, and to send the LOMAs back to the community officials for records keeping.
Here in Colorado, El Paso County used to charge $1.25/page of a recorded document (for something like a deed or easement... they charged a lot more/page for a plat). When doing something like an ALTA Survey, where you may need to access many documents, each of which could easily be 10, 20, 30, or more pages, this made the cost REALLY skyrocket.
They finally got a class-action lawsuit, which forced them to reduce the price/page for things like deeds and easements to $0.25.
The funny thing is that they now offer a subscription site, which we must pay a monthly charge for, but they STILL charge us $0.25 for every page we print from their site, even though WE are paying for the printer and paper, and printing it locally in our own office. Yet for some items, we can access them FOR FREE via their public website, and print the exact same documents at no charge.
Not sure how they determine what's available on their free website, and what's available on the pay-per-print subscription site. A lot of times, documents are available on BOTH. So we've learned to try the free website first, then access the pay-per-print website only when we can't get what we need.
The whole setup is kind of funky...
