GOVERNMENT is big business in California.

It is so big that officials often look for ways they can make money on what government produces.

In some cases, that product is paper — public records.

Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed budget calls for letting state courts — which have been hit hard by state budget cuts — start charging the public, businesses and the media a search fee for looking up criminal and court filings.

The proposed fee would be $10 per search. On top of that, Brown's budget plan would double the existing photocopying charge from 50 cents to $1 a page.

Court officials say the fee would help them recoup their costs in meeting public-record demands of so-called data miners, commercial enterprises that ask for large numbers of files, extract commercially viable information and then sell that information.

The proposed fee replaces a charge of $15 for searches that take longer than 10 minutes. It's unlikely that charge covers the cost of having a clerk track down dozens or hundreds of files for data miners.

It also sounds as if the state, as the producer and provider, wants a bigger piece of that action. Brown and the courts are looking for ways to reverse a recent trend of budget cuts that have led to closing courtrooms, shortening hours and laying off workers.

While officials say the fee is needed to recover costs associated with large-volume requests, the charge does not differentiate between users.

That's the problem Sen. Loni Hancock of Berkeley has with the proposal. She calls it another step toward "a fee-for-justice system," where people who cannot afford the fee don't have access to the information they need in their pursuit of justice.

The same goes for the media. Reporters, including IJ staffers, often comb through courthouse records in their reporting of local news. The proposed charge puts a chill on access to public records, especially hampering smaller papers that have to work on smaller budgets.

For the IJ, the charge, as presented, could run $800 or more every week.

In its current iteration, the charge would not apply to people seeking files regarding cases in which they are personally involved.

But the question of fair and open access to public records looms heavily over this proposed fee. In addition, there's a question about the fee being commensurate with the cost of the service, whether someone is asking for one file or hundreds.

Lawmakers, who have to approve the proposed fee, should demand the courts detail the dollars-and-cents costs of handling requests for files, both for small and large searches.

In a recent speech, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye said, "What we once counted on — that courts would be open, available and ready to dispense prompt justice, is no longer the case in California."

That is a sad indictment of the state of California's courts. But making court records — public information — less accessible by making them more costly to review and copy doesn't seem to be a logical remedy to fixing what's wrong with our courts.