The Huffington Post is reporting that requesting Sarah Palin’s email records will cost you a pretty penny as Alaska charges a steep fee for the privilege:

Alaska administrative director, Linda Perez, applied a flat rate of $960.31 per email account searched; given that there are approximately 16,000 full time employees in Alaska, the fee would have topped $15 million. Had Alaska’s part-time employees been included in the search, the fee assessed would have been $27.8 million.

Several other requests by NBC and the AP–most notably NBC’s request for all records of Todd Palin’s email activities on his government issued BlackBerry–also soared above the $15 million mark. Had news agencies agreed to these exorbitant fees, Palin’s emails would have topped Alaskan crude oil as the state’s No. 1 export. In fact, most news agencies refined or rescinded their requests in response to the projected fees.

This raises the question of how legal such search fees are. Compliance and archiving isn’t a choice, regulations demand it. While complying with information requests is certainly time consuming, does it warrant such incredible fees? Clearly some sort of regulation in this area is needed.