You are browsing the archives of October 2009.

Government agencies commonly charge reasonable fees to reproduce public records as necessary to cover their copy costs and search time. But what happens when these costs are prohibitively expensive? Santa Clara County recently paid a $500,000 settlement for legal fees after fighting a First Amendment Coalition lawsuit which challenged the excessive prices the county charged for Geographic Information System (GIS) maps.

Restaurants’ food safety inspection reports, required to be conducted at least once a year in most states, have always been available via a public records request to city or county health departments. However, they are becoming more readily available and searchable online.

The Sacramento Bee recently published a database of gifts given to California politicians by synthesizing information from publicly available records, including elected officials’ financial disclosure filings and lobbyists’ disclosure reports.