Tuesday public records links round-up

It’s time again for a round-up of the best of FOIA blogging around the country. As always, our round-up pays special attention to blogs we haven’t noticed before. We find a lot of great local blogs this way. Enjoy!

All of these links lead to great stories. Let’s get started.

Kansas: Johnson County wanted $1,300 for 900 pages of documents; nearby Overland Park wants $29,500 for about 8,300 pages. Don’t ask why; you’ll get a migraine.

Kentucky: Depth Reporting is a great blog, even if it is run by a professional reporter. We don’t entirely disdain such people, even though we are mere “citizen journalists”, the hoi polloi and PDQ night clerks of the internet. But I digress. The Kentucky state police violated the open records law.

Louisiana: Did or did not Alexandria Mayor Jacques Roy violate the open records law? Don’t know yet.

New York: Homeland Security Alert! Attorney General Andrew Cuomo can’t release his schedule without imperilling global security!

Ohio: Maggie Thurber advises readers on finding out about government staff salaries.

Pennsylvania: The Wyomissing School Board tried to bargain away the public’s right to know. Don’t do that.

Pennsylvania: Reflections on Pennsylvania’s new open records top honcho. But not all is well with public access in the state. It’s positively Sisyphean, actually.

South Carolina: 54 days to deliver government salary information. Unions at fault? (This blog post also refers to the Sunshine Blogger Project.)

Tennessee: Why did Elbert Jefferson take time out of his busy schedule to go to Memphis to lobby for a bill to make it harder to access public documents?

Texas: Should city council members be able to police their own spending? Um, no. Also from the Lone Star State, don’t miss The Purge, Part 12. It’s better than Masterpiece Theater.

Virginia: Reading The Hook reminds me of why so often it would just be easier to deny the records request.

Read, enjoy, comment. As a sidenote, I started this blog in April 2007. There are vastly more blog posts and newspaper articles about state-level open records access issues than there were a year ago.

Thanks to Maverick recently returned from a roller derby tour to Seattle, for doing the research for this post!