Not just media demand info

You — the private citizens of America — comprise the largest group of users of the federal Freedom of Information Act — the formal request for public records and information.

This is according to a study by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, released in August 2005.

After private citizens, lawyers make up the largest group that use the Freedom of Information Act, a federal statute that allows any person to obtain federal records — unless those records or parts of them are protected from disclosure by certain legal exemptions.

Where do journalists rank in filing for information? By the numbers, they're only "minor players" on the national level, according to the Coalition of Journalists.

Here in Berkshire County, local municipalities do not get many Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests.

Mark Webber, the administrative assistant in both the towns of Cheshire and West Stockbridge, said he sees such a request once "every two or three years, at best."

Typically, said Webber, the request comes from a lawyer seeking municipal, real estate or assessment information.

"These requests involve us because we are the keepers of town records, not necessarily because there has

been any malfeasance on the part of the town," said Webber.

Alfred Skrocki, the superintendent of the Adams-Cheshire Regional School District, estimated that he has seen one FOIA request in the past five years, from a party who was interested in teachers' salaries.

"We rarely see any," he said.

Frederick Lantz, the spokesman for the Berkshire County District Attorney's Office, said his office received one such request from a Boston-area newspaper requesting crime statistics.

More likely, say town and state officials, such a request for information will come on an informal level. Skrocki noted, for example, that he sometimes gets requests from reporters for minutes of School Committee meetings to help in the creation of a story.

Lawyers seeking insurance or other company-based information sometimes have to rely on FOIA requests, according to attorney Thomas Campoli, senior partner at Campoli and Campoli in Pittsfield.

"It will happen when you're dealing with a government agency like (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration)," said Campoli. "We'll file a request to gain access to information gathered as part of an investigation. If we think it's information that will be helpful on behalf of a client, we'll go after it."

Stockbridge Police Chief Richard B. Wilcox recalled a team of lawyers and insurance investigators in his office several years ago. They made a formal request for records of his department's investigations of violent crimes in Stockbridge over a period of years.

At one point, said Wilcox, he had to redact, or "black out" certain portions of some of the documents to preserve an open investigation.

But while local government sees relatively few FOIA requests, it is a much different story at the federal level.

According to FOIA Post, a newsletter published by the federal government, FOIA requests topped four million in 2004, an all-time high.

This was an increase of 23 percent from 2003. Of the 2,460 legal suits reported in 2004 that involved FOIA requests, only 18 of them came from media outlets.

The departments that processed the most requests were, in order, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Almost all of the 1.84 million requests to the Social Security Administration were from individuals seeking their own Social Security records, the FOIA Post reported.

The Department of Veterans Affairs reported it received 1.82 million FOIA requests, again almost entirely from veterans or their families seeking information.

The Department of Health and Human Services was a distant third, with 142,000 requests.

A federal audit in 2002 of FOIA revealed that FOIA-related activities for all federal agencies cost more than $300 million. Of that figure, about $18 million was spent in litigation.

The Coalition of Journalists report noted that individuals requesting personal information are most likely to get that information. Government response times of 10 to 12 days was the average.