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Don't mess with my FOIA!!!

Man brings 300,000 pennies to DMV to ‘inconvenience’ the state

POSTED 5:27 PM, JANUARY 12, 2017, BY TRIBUNE MEDIA WIRE

LEBANON, Va. — A man used 300,000 pennies to pay taxes on two cars at a DMV office in Cedar Bluff, Virginia on Wednesday, the Bristol Herald Courier reported.

Nick Stafford told the paper he wheeled the pennies into the office to prove and point and get back at state government.

He claimed he was given the runaround and forced to sue the state after he was denied direct phone numbers to DMV offices in his area following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

“If they were going to inconvenience me then I was going to inconvenience them,” he told the newspaper. “I think the backbone to our republic and our democracy is open government and transparency in government and it shocks me that a lot of people don’t know the power of FOIA.”

Stafford told the Bristol Herald Courier he hired 11 people and spent fours unrolling pennies and putting the change into wheelbarrows.

http://fox17online.com/2017/01/12/man-brings-300000-pennies-to-dmv-...

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Permalink Reply by XLFD on January 13, 2017 at 2:47pm

Next time he shouldn't use clean wheelbarrows.

It's disgusting, you ask for public information and they create their own exemptions, they make you file a lawsuit to get it and then they give you the information after trying attorney tactics, and effectively you gain nothing while the money gets transferred from one public agency to another, the courts. That is, if the court actually decide you prevail, which my experience is they won't, even when it's clear. From one of the news links inside the article:

On Tuesday, a judge dismissed the (three) lawsuits at the request of the state when a representative of the state’s attorney general handed Stafford a list of the requested phone numbers in the courtroom. The court also did not impose penalties on the DMV and its employees, which could have been between $500 and $2,000 per lawsuit if the employees had “willfully and knowingly” violated public records law.

“The phone numbers are irrelevant to me,” Stafford said. “I don't need them. I told the judge ‘I think I proved my point here.’”

“I think the backbone to our republic and our democracy is open government and transparency in government and it shocks me that a lot of people don't know the power of FOIA,” Stafford said.