Officials take class on public records. It’s good economic sense for state attorney generals to hold trainings like this, since it saves them money down the road having to defend bogus denials.

Media Outlets Announce Open-Record Suit Concerning 911 Case: A consortium of Wisconsin media outlets have filed a lawsuit seeking access to 911 records in the wake of a tragic death after a 911-call-gone-bad.

It’s Tuesday, and that means it is time to see what is fresh and new around the FOIAsphere. More and more blogs are writing about access to public records. It’s great!

Arkansas: The Arkansas Blog notes that Arkansas attorney general Dustin McDaniel has ruled that prospective requests for future e-mails are not valid requests under Arkansas law. Not good.

California: The Marin Independent Journal fought the good fight for two years to get county government salary information. They just won. Thanks for noticing, PI Buzz, which is an A+++ blog about access to public records.

Iowa: FOI FYI doesn’t pull any punches writing about Iowa Gov. Chet Culver’s proposal to charge requestors to have government lawyers review documents. “This is dangerous stuff.”.

Missouri: Oh, we love the Blunt-Nixon e-mail open records war in Missouri. But just for its educational value. Otherwise, we disdain raw political machinations. Should Matt Blunt be our next STOTW?

Tennessee: Our once unwavering confidence in Gov. Bredesen’s sunshine quotient has eroded. His office is now murking around with requests for copies of emails about the expensive renovation of the state’s executive mansion.

Washington: Look away, Washington citizens. You have no legitimate interest in records from investigations into allegations of misconduct by a police officer. Avert your gaze.

Wisconsin: Well Armed Sheep (a great name for a blog, isn’t it?) is in the hunt for records of a meeting of a university committee. Good luck.

A big thank you to Maverick for finding these links, and congratulations to her for her blocking in a thrilling come-from-behind victory for the Unholy Rollers in the Mad Rollin Dolls season finale on Saturday.

The Arizona Star has done an amazing piece of in-depth reporting on student grades and school performance in the Tucson area. Their project took over ten months, untold open records requests, and digging through the 3 million student grade records they received.

Ultimately, the Star found that in the nine school districts they reviewed, “many more students were being promoted yearly than were passing classes.” For my readers who have not bought into the soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to public education, that’s a remarkable finding.

One school district–Amphitheater Public Schools–refused to comply with the Star’s FOIA requests, saying that the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) made compliance illegal. I wonder if someone at Amphitheatre Public Schools will call up the feds and blow the whistle on the other eight school districts. Nah. That’s because the other eight school districts redacted personally identifiable information, just like APS could have.

One main finding from this mega-study is how hard it was for the newspaper to pull the information they sought out of the data. If it was that hard for them, this suggests to me that the school districts themselves haven’t figured out the correlations that the newspaper ultimately discovered. That’s a problem.

There’s a new watchblog in Memphis, Tennessee: Smart City Memphis. Weighing in on ongoing efforts in the Tennessee legislature to muck around with that state’s open records law, Smart City Memphis takes no prisoners.

State Rep. Ulysses Jones must have been frightened by sunshine while he was in his crib.

Only a childhood trauma could have given him such an obsession in eroding the transparency and openness of government with his amendments to weaken Tennessee’s open meetings (Sunshine Law) and public records laws.

Every Tennessean should be up in arms. This isn’t about journalists having a harder time to report on the inner workings of government. More to the point, it’s about erecting obstacles to the public’s right to know.

Read the rest here.

We give that advice to bloggers–don’t wait for paid reporters to file Freedom of Information Act requests–go ahead and do it yourself. There are too many units of government for reporters to keep track of under the best of circumstances, and investigative reporters are being laid off right and left.

But the idea to not wait for the press was recently shared by education writer Kent Fischer, who encouraged members of public school boards to not wait for the press. He is encouraging school board members to use the open records process available to them to find out about financial management problems in their school system–before the press finds out.

Fischer is a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. That paper has been running a series on financial problems with the Dallas Independent School District. They’ve uncovered millions of dollars of questionable spending just by looking at public records.

Don’t wait for the press–look into your finances now.

Fischer suggests that board members start by looking at what district credit cards are purchasing. In the case of the DISD, that included included blanket and pillow sets, Star Trek DVDs, iPods, and a subscription to an online dating service.

Update: Check out the comments for an important clarification.

This is the new logo we’re using for the Lucy Burns Institute.  Thoughts?

We installed a traffic meter on WikiFOIA in May 2007. The sitemeter enables us to see that 76% of the people who visit the site find it through a search engine, rather than visiting it from a link on some other website.

The search engine visitors are usually looking for information about salaries of government employees, and secondarily are looking for information about open records legislation and access to state public documents.

I was pleased to see that comparing website visitors in May 2007 to May 2008, WikiFOIA has already had 10 times as many pages viewed in May 2008 as it did the entire month of May in 2007–a little over 10,000 pages viewed in the first eight days of the month.

Since we created WF to make it easy for people to find this kind of information in what we hope is a usefully arranged way, we’re really pleased at how it’s going.

It’s time again for a round-up of the best of FOIA blogging around the country, with yet another selection of blogs we’ve never seen before who are diving into the FOIAsphere.

California: Take two aspirin before you read this story.

Illinois: Why does Gov. Thompson focus so much on the Illinois Sports Facility Authority? Bloggers! The unchecked growth of cynicism staggers us.

Iowa: Chet not like open records. That’s Chet, the gov. Blogger says, “Maybe Culver was inspired by his big pay raise, approved by lawmakers in the middle of the night.” Why is everyone so cynical these days?

Michigan: Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit is sad. Why, why is everyone so cynical and quick to rush to judgment these days?

Missouri: The F-sphere is ably represented in Missouri by KY3, who tells the tale of how Gov. Matt Blunt is striking back against the lawsuit he faces by targeting the e-mails of Jeff Harris. Look forward to many hours of innocent entertainment and education of Missourians on how open records and email works.

New Jersey: There’s a hospital in Hoboken that got a $52 million bond from the taxpayers to rescue it from financial disaster, wouldn’t open its books, and now the taxpayers will be left holding the bag. Why is everyone so cynical these days?

Pennsylvania: But, and I mean this without any sarcasm whatsoever- truly open government can be a real pain for those in power. So it seems.

Tennessee: The state legislature is playing games with open records. Why is everyone so cynical these days?

Texas: I love blogs! Local accountability! No one is denying that the closed session degenerated into shrieks that could be heard down the hall.

More Texas (it’s a big state): Lubbuck city councilman Todd Klein told to file an open records request if he wants to know what is going on with a project Lubbock is funding. But our friendly local blogger has little sympathy, saying welcome to the crowd.

Federal FOIA: The FOIA drop-box idea.

Keep those FOIA posts coming. How else will we know about the closed sessions generating into shrieks, the city council members who have to file FOIAs to get information for their own city, and so much else? It’s a rich tapestry that tells the endlessly interesting story of people whose parents never told them that you can’t fight city hall.

The big news in open records circles today is that a lawsuit has been launched against the Republican Governor of Missouri, Matt Blunt, alleging that his top aides ordered staffers “to break the law by destroying copies of government e-mails so they wouldn’t ever become public”.

The lawsuit is civil; the plaintiff is an independent investigative team set up by Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon.

It’s been a bad few weeks for statewide constitutional officers in the e-mail department. In stories we’ve been covering, Democratic Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann seems to be on the verge of being forced out of office because of e-mail woes.

North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley was in trouble earlier this week because of something that sounds extremely similar to what Blunt’s office did in Missouri, but that story has been chased off the front page by yet another exciting and thrilling event in our nation’s long walk to November: The Pansy Remark, which at last count had been mentioned in 3,932 online news articles, about 3,922 more than have mentioned the e-mail problem.

See other governors and their e-mail woes or triumphs.

Update: Another charming and confidence-inspiring open records action from a governor, this time Chet Culver of Iowa, who wants state agencies to start charging to have government lawyers review documents requested under Iowa’s open-records law.