Carnival of Open Records hosted by WikiFOIA

September 12, 2007

Welcome to the fifth Carnival of Open Records! Since a lot of people have been reading and enjoying this Carnival, it seemed like a fun idea to host an edition of it here at WikiFOIA. For those who may not know, I do a lot of the writing and editing for WikiFOIA for the Lucy Burns Institute, and I am very excited to see the good response that people are having to it and to the new blogging attention that is being given to the Freedom of Information Act.

Carnival hosting for next week's edition is still up for grabs, so if you are interested head over to the Carnival of Open Records Sign Up and sign up.

On to what you are all really here for – the links!

As I was putting this together, a theme started to emerge. It would seem that there is some interest in the blogosphere of what happens when some of the duties that public agencies take on are outsourced to private companies. In fact, that was the Hot button issues of the week at WikiFOIA not too long ago: Private organizations, Government dollars. Well, we weren’t the only ones interested in the subject:

David Kassel of the Accountable Strategies blog writes about When privatization is taken to the extreme. He discusses the situation of private security contractors in Iraq in particular, but the model of a private entity providing public services is just as applicable at the local level.
“When governmental functions and services are privatized, courts have been inconsistent as to whether these same services can still be considered to be “state actions.” As a result, citizens’ rights are often no longer protected by the usual rules. If these privatized services are now considered to be private acts, legal accountability for them can only be maintained by such things as criminal prosection, contract enforcement, or lawsuits. The Fourteenth Amendment and the Freedom of Information Act don’t apply anymore.”

Bill McCrory of Whitecaps in Idaho has this posting: The Cost of Public Information, about a report paid for by his municipality with tax dollars. His take is that since it was tax dollars that funded the report in the first place, it is out of line for the city to charge him again for a copy of it. In his words:
“I won't pay. Given what we know about how Coeur d'Alene City Hall operates, sending a check for $537.11 and agreeing to pay even more if the City says it needs more would be like going to a homebuilder who has already given me reason to distrust him, giving him all the money up front, and then hoping he delivers on his promise to build the house I want without ever showing me the plans. No one would be foolish enough to do that.”

In Connecticut, universal health care recently became available. However, the spending on that program is largely routed through private HMO’s. Unsurprisingly, the private HMO’s (or ‘MCO’s - managed care organizations’ as they are known in CT) are proving resistant to FOIA. This despite the fact that “the managed care contractors have been offered a 2 percent budgeted increase” to offset FOI compliance costs. Health Care, a blogging project of the New Haven Independent discusses the situation here: Will State Follow the Health Care $$$ for Kids?

Another topic recently featured on the Hot button issues of the week is that of Identity Theft. State Sunshine Open Records has a thought-provoking post about the moral obligations that go with exposing people’s personal information to the public eye: Witholding information about victims identity

Those are some of the best blog posts I found over the last few weeks that were similar to Hot Button Issues, but they were by no means the only good blog posts concerning open records! Read on for more:

Joey Dauben of The Ellis County Observer in Texas (and the first in our series of Sunshine Activist Interviews!) has been digging into the question of how police officer expenditures are accounted for in this series: Open Records in Midlothian, Midlothian: Open Records Part 2 and it looks like now he could use some help getting through the documents he has received: Midlothian: Four Inches Thick. But he has been able to compile a list of police saleries, available here: Midlothian Police Department Salaries.

In Wisconsin, John Washburn of Washburn's World has been investigating where election records went after the November 2, 2004 election: WI SEB Complaint Filed Regarding Donating of November 2, 2004 Election Records.

In Kentucky, bloggers at The Conservative Edge are getting into the open records game with this post: My first open records request to state auditor Crit LuAllen. They are asking for a lot of interesting stuff, so this will be a good story to follow along.

The California Supreme Court ruled not too long ago that the salaries of public employees are public FOIAble items. Along with that ruling, it has been judged that the NAMES of people employeed by the government are also FOIAble, or as Group News Blog puts it, Public 1, Police 0.

Also in California, the folks at The Liberal OC want to know Why is Diane Harkey Hiding from the Public?

To close up things today, Peggy Tibbetts of From the Styx in Colorado writes about Pure Entertainment, or the idea that filing public records requests means that you are on a "witch hunt". It never occured to these public bodies that people in the community might just have valid concerns about the way things are being run?

I had a great time poring over the internet in search of people that are actively using open records to be parts of their communities. I hope that you enjoyed it too! If you did, please consider hosting your own edition of the Carnival of Open Records sometime soon. To sign up, go to Carnival of Open Records Sign Up or just send an e-mail to me at info@wikifoia.org.
If you have any comments or questions about today's edition, use the "comments" tab at the top of the page to let me know.
Thanks!
-- Maverick


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