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City of Suffolk charges for information – for some…
August 26th, 2008 by Scott

invoiceSUFFOLKbigAs most are aware, the City of Suffolk Communications Director Debbie George refused to add bloggers to her mailing lists for press releases.

This of course is a slap in the fact to Open Government and pretty much showed what type of organization the City of Suffolk is.

So I sent a FOIA request to Dana Woodson, the FOIA Officer for the City of Suffolk.

What you see at left is an invoice for the press releases from the City of Suffolk.

The bottom line is, a citizen had to pay for something that the city gives away freely to others.

Why is that?

Why is it, that citizens in one group are treated differently that citizens in another group?

Things that make you go hmmmmm….

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2 Responses  
  • jason writes:
    August 26th, 2008 at 22:56 pm

    I especially like the hand written note at the bottom of the invoice. I’m surprised they didn’t charge you for the time it took to write that. This is mind-boggling. Blogger = media. End of story. When will local government get it right?

           
  • D. Panagopulos writes:
    August 28th, 2008 at 06:44 am

    I also received an invoice for Ms. George’s time to assemble my FOIA request concerning media press releases. I was charged $44.oo for one hour of her time to search and copy documents and $10.oo for copying. The process was extented the maximum alloted time of 19 days before receiving notice the FOIA packet was available. To my surprise my initial letter to Ms. George on behalf of Inside Suffolk requesting press releases was missing and required another day for her to locate. The kicker is not all documents were released under the Working Papers exclusion. What could possibly be excluded as working papaers under a FOIA for press releases to the public? So much for the Mayor’s Open & Transparent government. This issue is not going away.

           


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