The Associated Press is reporting on an interesting public records story. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency has requested that The Advocate newspaper of Baton Rouge, Louisiana pay nearly $210,000 for a public records request that requires the agency to produce over 2 million pages of documents.

The Advocate is investigating FEMA’s response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita and has officially requested the documents relating to the agency’s inspection and maintenance of government issued trailers and mobile homes. FEMA states that the first 100 pages of any public records request are free and every page thereafter costs 10 cents to produce for a total cost of about $210,000.

FEMA spokesman James McIntyre states that the agency charges for large public records requests that requires pulling FEMA employees from other jobs to handle the processing of the request.

The executive editor of The Advocate, Carl Redman, stated that FEMA has used stalling tactics to avoid the complying with the public records request ever since it was submitted in September 2006.

The newspaper is requesting copies of contracts, invoices and other public records associated with the trailers and mobile homes that have housed tens of thousands of victims of the 2005 hurricanes.

Source: MediaInfo.com

The Social Security Death Index ( or SSDI as it is commonly called ) is a searchable database of deceased people that is maintained by the U. S. Social Security Administration, using their Death Master File records.

As of this post, the Social Security Death Index contains over 80 million records of people who were reported to the U.S. Social Security Administration as being deceased from 1962 to the present.

You can search the Social Security Death Index for deceased people by entering one or more pieces of information about the person, including: last name, first name, middle initial or the person’s social security number.

If there is a record of that person’s death on file in the Social Security Death Index database, the search engine will return the following information to you about the deceased person: first name, middle initial, date of birth, date of death, last known residence, last benefit, social security number and the state that the SSN was issued in.

NOTE: not all deceased U.S. citizens are listed in the Social Security Death Index.

There are several reasons a person may not be listed in the Social Security Death Index search, including the following:

# The death wasn’t reported to the Social Security Administration.

# The death occurred before the SSA’s Death Master File was maintained on a database. About 98 percent of the deaths in Social Security Death Index database occurred from the year 1962 – present.

# The deceased person did not participate in the Social Security program.

# Survivor death benefits are still being paid to the person’s dependents or spouse.

# The person’s death may be too recent and, therefore, not indexed yet.

# Other human errors.

The Social Security Death Index search is routinely used by genealogy researchers to find records of deceased family members as well as fraud investigators to find out if a social security number ( SSN ) is on record as having belonged to a deceased person.

Rootsweb.com offers a free SSDI people search that anyone can use @ Social Security Death Index Search Engine.

More and more states are making voter registration verification records publicly available with free online searches.

Most of the state voter registration searches require users to input one or more of the following pieces of information:

- The person’s first and / or last names.

- The person’s address, often including county.

- The zip code of the person’s residence.

- The person’s date of birth.

The Federal Voting Assistance Program has a list of states that offer online voter registration record verification online.

Currently, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, DC, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia offer some type of voter registration records search online.

You can access the Federal Voting Assistance Program’s list at State Voter Registration Verification Web sites.

Source: PI Buzz

Connecticut’s state judicial system has made public criminal and motor vehicle violation records available with a free website search.

According to an Associated Press article, this move towards more open and easily accessible public records has drawn praise from freedom of information advocates and criticism from privacy activists.

Over 1 million of Connecticut’s criminal conviction records, going back to 2000, are now available with one web search. The open records effort to put public criminal records on the web came from the recommendation of a state task force of judges, state officials, attorneys and members of the media.

The task force recommended putting all felony and misdemeanor convictions on the web, allowing misdemeanor records to be removed after five years.

Criminal case records and motor vehicle violations were already a matter of public record, but the web search makes them available without people having to make a special trip to the state archives and search through public record files.

You can do your own public records search on Connecticut’s Conviction & Bond Forfeiture Dispositions Criminal/Motor Vehicle database by defendant name at jud2.ct.gov

Source: stltoday.com

EastValleyTribune.com is reporting on an Arizona Court of Appeals ruling, favoring faster responses on the part of state and local governments to public records requests.

The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled unanimously on Tuesday that government departments cannot make people wait for weeks or months for public records that have been requested.

The public records ruling states in part that government records custodians “shall promptly furnish such copies, photographs or printouts.” The ruling goes further by saying that any public records request that is not handled promptly is deemed to have been denied.

The ruling did not specify a time for “promptly”. However, Justice Murray Snow stated that there is no way that a delay of more than 100 days, as happened in a case involving the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, can be considered reasonable.

The ruling acknowledged that delays have to be judged on a case-by-case basis. However, the justices also concluded that public agencies can’t avoid their legal duties for prompt responses simply because a government employee neglected to honor the request.

The public records legal case involves a number of requests made by New Times for sheriff records. These ranged from personnel records to investigation reports about Dan Saban — at the time of the request, Dan Saban was running against incumbent Sheriff Joe Arpaio — on sexual misconduct charges.

The records requests took over 143 days to handle, after the election was over.

The court ruled that this was not a “prompt” handling of the request under Arizona’s public records laws.

The ruling, however, does not end the legal battle. The judges sent the case back to the trial judge to decide if the delays were in bad faith or were arbitrary and capricious. These legal standards will determine if the county is obligated to pay the legal fees for the newspaper.

Source: EastValleyTribune.com