A secretary to the Rockbridge County administrator called it "off the record."

The mayor of Martinsville said it was private.

The city clerk in Fairfax said it would cost more than $7,000.

E-mail communications among elected officials can be hard to obtain in Virginia, even though the law says they are public. Requests for e-mail among elected officials in all 134 of the state's cities and counties were successful 42 percent of the time. Virginia newspaper employees asked to see the most recent two weeks of e-mail.

In 10 percent of localities, the newspaper representatives were denied records, either because of a failure to respond to requests, high costs or unfamiliarity with the law. The rest of the time, requesters came back empty-handed because e-mail was not used or because the county office they visited said it did not have custody of e-mail messages kept on private computers.

The media representatives' reports show that while many localities are complying with the letter of the freedom of information laws, they're still not very successful at getting requested documents into the public's hands.

Most often, the media representatives who asked for the documents were told the records didn't exist. That was either because the officials said they didn't use e-mail to communicate with each other, or because the government had no way of tracking e-mail messages sent among nongovernment addresses.

Maria Everett, executive director of the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council, said that by staying away from e-mail, public officials can ensure that their deliberations stay in the public realm.

In several localities, records gatekeepers said they could not directly track supervisors or council members who were using personal e-mail accounts.

Some of those gatekeepers sent the media representatives to each individual board member, but a few officials did that legwork themselves.

Eight localities told media representatives it would cost more than $100 to locate and copy e-mail messages. The largest bill came from the city of Fairfax, where Clerk Melanie Burrell told an auditor it would cost "no less than $7,081.20" to retrieve two weeks' worth of e-mail messages among city council members. She asked for a deposit of $3,000.

In an interview, Burrell said that figure was so high because of the time it would take to identify and sort all of the e-mail messages. The cost "is basically because we don't have a filter system," she said.

The law allows public bodies to recover the costs of accessing and copying information, but it does not allow them to generate revenue from those charges.

Officials in only three localities, Rockbridge County and the cities of Emporia and Martinsville, told reporters that they weren't allowed to see e-mail messages.