A FORMAL complaint has been lodged with Larne Borough Council following its refusal to reveal details about the cost of its website in response to a request under Freedom of Information legislation.
The Larne Times has learned that applicant Nick McBride contacted all 26 district councils in Northern Ireland through the WhatDoTheyKnow? website, asking each how much was spent on creating, developing and running websites in each year since they we
re launched.
He added, "Where possible, please break these costs out by function (for example development, design, updates, changes, hosting, co-location, domain registration, licensing etc).
"Where the costs have been incurred with external providers, please list the company in question. For internal staff time, if this is not recorded and/or charged explicitly, please provide estimates based on salary/overheads of people involved."
The purpose of Mr McBride's research is not known - and he did not respond to a Larne Times request for interview - but his question solicited "successful" or "partially successful" replies from half the district councils.
'unusual'
At the time of writing, the website indicated that one authority - Derry City Council - considered the inquiry to be "unusual", while it was "awaiting classification" in three others.
Larne is listed in a group of nine councils whose responses were said to be "overdue".
Smiley Buildings did acknowledge Mr McBride's FOI request within a day of receiving it on July 8 and undertook to reply within the statutory time scale of 20 working days.
The council 's response, on July 30, cited only development and maintenance costs for the website each year since 2003 - a total of £41,107.
Mr McBride complained the same day that most of the data requested had not been provided, to which the council replied that it was "not possible to break these costs out by function".
The full article contains 308 words and appears in Larne Times newspaper.
