LEXINGTON — An innovative FOIA “Tracker” designed by a four-employee team at the Virginia Department of Transportation won the Virginia Coalition for Open Government’s 2005 public-sector award for outstanding contributions to Freedom of Information.
Also honored at the coalition’s ACCESS 2005 conference were Robert McCabe (below), a (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot reporter, and citizen activists Andrew Beaujon and Don Harrison, both of Richmond.
VDOT’s FOIA Tracker is a Web-based system designed to record, track and archive the agency’s 350-400 yearly FOI requests. It calculates actual costs for producing public records, itemizes search time by administrative assistants and uniformly applies search and copying fees throughout the state.
The Tracker is designed to help the department’s more than 100 FOI coordinators and 9,000 employees comply with the FOI Act. The intranet system tracks request dates, calculates remaining days for compliance and reports any unpaid balance from an individual’s previous record request.
The Tracker team was led by Assistant Policy Director Frankie Giles. It also included Wendy Thomas, Jess Maricle and Veena Areti. According to Giles, it has made employees’ “FOIA life much easier.”
The Coalition urged VDOT to allow public access to its internal tracking system. It also commended the agency for waiving the first $50 of each requester’s search and copying costs.
McCabe and the Virginian-Pilot were honored for McCabe’s extensive use of state and federal open-record laws to obtain thousands of pages of state environmental and incorporation files, Chesapeake City planning documents, local property records, old public safety logbooks and federal records.
As a result, the newspaper revealed that the city unknowingly was continuing to allow houses to be built on old dumps and land tainted with high levels of toxic chemicals.
Coalition judges called McCabe’s stories a “classic example” of good journalism, protecting the public’s welfare and health.
Beaujon and Harrison received VCOG’s Laurence E. Richardson award for open-government contributions by individual citizens. The award honors the memory of a longtime Charlottesville broadcaster and VCOG founding director.
Concerned about public funding for a planned arts facility, Harrison and Beaujon used the FOI Act to obtain financial documents and correspondence from Richmond’s mayor and from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Financial reports then were posted online. Beaujon sought unsuccessfully to obtain records from the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation, which insisted it was not “principally funded” by taxpayers and thus not subject to Virginia’s FOI Act.