Open Records Request Essentials
Jan 25, 2017 6:16:23 GMT -5
Post by avordvet on Jan 25, 2017 6:16:23 GMT -5
Good to know information.
We've been cleaning our county up for a couple years now and the 'Open Records Request' is a powerful tool... Our last County Commission chairman lost his election for violating this law a number of times, while trying to push pet projects/funding through. He should've went to jail, but he just lost his job instead, and the rest of the commissioners put policy in place so a chairman can't do it again.
Open Records Request Essentials
Tom Baugh, January 24, 2017
We’ve been building toward a doctrine for exposing and eliminating misconduct by local government officials, and one important tool in that doctrine is the open records request. Think of this tool as a recon element. Like a recon element, this tool can be used to alert you to unexpected behavior in general, or to focus like a laser beam on a specific line of inquiry. And, like a recon element, a records request is not the primary effort, either in defense or offense, but gathers information so that you can marshal your other legal, civil and public affairs efforts for maximum and overwhelming impact at a time and place of your choosing.
In a previous Leech City article, we described the Georgia open records law in detail, and noted that most other states will have similar “sunshine” laws in place. In this article, we show an actual, current records request, and break down the essential elements so that your own requests can have the maximum impact. We’ll write a followup article on the response we receive from this request, which will be an interesting exercise to see unfolding live. As always with any material on this site, I am not an attorney and nothing you read here is legal advice, merely an exploration of what we have done, why, and the results obtained. You may wish to consult an attorney in your area for issues specific to your particular state.
The request we will examine here is dated yesterday, the 23rd of January, 2017, and sent by certified mail today, the 24th. You can read the entire request by downloading the PDF. As shown in the PDF, the subject of this request is any grants received by the city in the past 20 years. We’ll analyze why the information sought is important to our particular situation in a future article, but in this article we want to focus on the format of the letter more so than this specific issue.
As shown in the PDF, this request has several elements common to all of our requests:
starvingthemonkeys.com/2017/01/24/open-records-request-essentials/
We've been cleaning our county up for a couple years now and the 'Open Records Request' is a powerful tool... Our last County Commission chairman lost his election for violating this law a number of times, while trying to push pet projects/funding through. He should've went to jail, but he just lost his job instead, and the rest of the commissioners put policy in place so a chairman can't do it again.
Open Records Request Essentials
Tom Baugh, January 24, 2017
We’ve been building toward a doctrine for exposing and eliminating misconduct by local government officials, and one important tool in that doctrine is the open records request. Think of this tool as a recon element. Like a recon element, this tool can be used to alert you to unexpected behavior in general, or to focus like a laser beam on a specific line of inquiry. And, like a recon element, a records request is not the primary effort, either in defense or offense, but gathers information so that you can marshal your other legal, civil and public affairs efforts for maximum and overwhelming impact at a time and place of your choosing.
In a previous Leech City article, we described the Georgia open records law in detail, and noted that most other states will have similar “sunshine” laws in place. In this article, we show an actual, current records request, and break down the essential elements so that your own requests can have the maximum impact. We’ll write a followup article on the response we receive from this request, which will be an interesting exercise to see unfolding live. As always with any material on this site, I am not an attorney and nothing you read here is legal advice, merely an exploration of what we have done, why, and the results obtained. You may wish to consult an attorney in your area for issues specific to your particular state.
The request we will examine here is dated yesterday, the 23rd of January, 2017, and sent by certified mail today, the 24th. You can read the entire request by downloading the PDF. As shown in the PDF, the subject of this request is any grants received by the city in the past 20 years. We’ll analyze why the information sought is important to our particular situation in a future article, but in this article we want to focus on the format of the letter more so than this specific issue.
As shown in the PDF, this request has several elements common to all of our requests:
starvingthemonkeys.com/2017/01/24/open-records-request-essentials/