Want to know exactly what Toronto trustees have charged taxpayers for since the 2010 election? Getting that information will cost you $3,300.

That’s the amount the Star was quoted after filing a freedom-of-information request to the Toronto District School Board for the expenses, including receipts, of the 22 elected officials.

Even after a modified request seeking only conference costs filed by four trustees — including Gerri Gershon, who billed taxpayers $3,765 for a controversial trip to Israel — the price tag was still $1,485.

A letter of explanation from the school board cited 48 hours of “search and preparation” at $30 an hour, or $1,440, plus $45 to photocopy 225 pages. After a phone call to the board, the fee for the modified request was knocked down to $1,200.

The Star plans to appeal.

Because trustees do not publish details of their expenses publicly — unlike their Toronto Catholic counterparts and city councillors — staff would have to actually sift through boxes for receipts, the board said.

“We do not currently have this request in a single document and we don’t have an automatic system that can produce this report, so someone must manually search and retrieve individual receipts and related documents,” said spokesperson Ryan Bird, noting trustees recently voted to publish expense summaries online.

(Just one trustee, Sheila Cary-Meagher, has gone ahead on her own and made her expenses, receipts and all, publicly accessible.)

Costs for access to information requests are often used to delay or obstruct the release of documents, said lawyer Michel Drapeau, who is also professor at the University of Ottawa and author of several legal works on access to information.

“Now you have to complain to the information and privacy commissioner — they are going to investigate it, they are going to look into it and say, ‘No, you don’t have to (pay) that.’

“So it’s a way to slow you down.”

Most governments and institutions are moving toward “proactive” disclosure — publishing great detail online — “not only to meet the public disclosure obligations they have to taxpayers, but it’s the most cost-efficient way to do it” rather than trying to dig up records when a request is made for expenses, he said.

The Star obtained an internal audit of trustee expenses, which highlighted numerous examples of questionable spending, and then requested the receipts trustees had submitted over the past four years.

The newspaper then filed a third freedom-of-information request for all

— including receipts — to be released on an ongoing basis.

On Sept. 18, Chair Mari Rutka sent an email to trustees saying she’d like to reopen the expenses issue at the next board meeting.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“If the motion is reopened, I will make a new motion to publish our full expenses, including receipts and supporting detail,” said the email, obtained by the Star.

Amir Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor who specializes in access to information requests, slammed trustees for “shamefully hiding their expense reports and charging the Toronto Star an unseemly fortune to see them.

“In more transparent, less primitive institutions, that kind of information is free. Nor is it secret or hard to come by because it has to be gathered for audit and accounting purposes anyway. I see absolutely no justification.”