A blog dedicated to public records requests and Monterey County news.

Friday, August 30, 2013

The Lost Tale of 2nd Lt. Valorie Pollard

Sometimes the best stories can be the hardest to do.

In early August, I became obsessed with the found remains of 2nd Lt. Valorie Pollard. It turned out the Defense Department's Prisoner of War Missing Personnel Office had finally identified this man after he went missing in World War II nearly 70 years ago.

Pollard was a complete mystery and it just made me work that much harder. I called every Pollard in Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties, searched tons of online military databases, read the obituaries of everyone with his last name in our paper archive and called just about every government agency I could think of.

Besides some very basic information, it was a dead end.

In my desperation, I filed a request with the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.

In the meantime, I tracked down Pollard's daughter and a neighbor. The result was one of the top 20 stories I've ever done. Here's the link.

A few weeks later I got my request back from the center in St. Louis. It turned out Pollard's file was burned in the now-infamous fire that torched 16 to 18 million records in 1973.

I do not plan to put many rejections for information on this blog, but I thought this one was worth a post because it is so heartbreaking. This man gave his life for the United States and when we finally find his remains, it is a lost cause because he did not have much family left.

For Pete's sake, we could never even find a photo of the guy!

Still, I think there is some good news here. 1) At least we found his daughter and were able to put together an article that can be a reference for future generations and 2) It sounds like the center has really turned things around.



Friday, August 23, 2013

Salinas: Jose Castañeda's $2,300 travel bill

The Salinas City Council seems to get plenty of ink in local papers, especially Mayor Joe Gunter and Councilman Jose Castañeda.

It even looks like both men could be subject to a recall election next year.

So I decided it would be a good idea to check in on their reimbursement forms. Although Castañeda racked up a hefty travel bill, an article was a tough sell because all of his trips had been approved by the city council.

I don't regularly cover Salinas so I might have missed something here. Below you can check out both men's forms from Dec. 19, 2012, to April 11, 2013.



Jose Castaneda 1 -
Joe Gunter -

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Monterey City Council wants taxpayers to pay for ...

Monterey City Council members asked to be reimbursed for more than $3,000 from January 2011 to May 2013.

They asked for everything from plane tickets to business cards.

I could not find anything troubling about any of the purchases and compared to a lot of municipalities and cities I've covered, it seemed like Monterey politicians were a little more careful with this kind of thing.

I did find it a bit odd Nancy Selfridge had to buy her own business cards. Also, it looked as if Frank Sollecito had asked to be reimbursed for a ticket to an art event which, at least on the surface, appeared to be for his wife.

At the end of the day, it was only for $30 and hardly worth clearing the front page.

 Check it out for yourself:    
Monterey City Council -

Monday, August 19, 2013

Naval Postgraduate School's "ethical standards" in curriculum

After getting all the FOIAs from the Naval Postgraduate School (see Saturday's post) I decided to make a request for one that had already been made.

Someone had requested a response the school had made to the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman to review educational materials for "anti-Islamic content."

The response was fairly boring and it happened too long ago, so I decided against a story. Yet sticking with the purpose of this blog, I am sharing the response here.

The school basically listed a bunch of ways it searches and prevents this type of thing and, unless someone from the inside tells me differently, it looks like they are doing a pretty good job.

Tomorrow I will start getting into my municipal requests before swinging back around to local military stuff.

Read NPS' response below:



NPS FOIA follow -

Saturday, August 17, 2013

FOIAing the FOIAs at Naval Postgraduate School

Today we will look at one of my favorite tricks to do when I'm new to a beat: Making a public records request for all the public records requests.

It might seem silly, but you learn some amazing stuff sometimes.

In this instance, I used the information to bolster my case for an article about a backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests at the Naval Postgraduate School.

I also later made a separate request for something I saw here and will post that Monday.

Below is my FOIA request for the FOIA requests and the Navy school. I should note the Presidio of Monterey denied a similar request for its requests a few months later.


NPS FOIAs -

Friday, August 16, 2013

My love of public records requests and thoughts on FOIA Machine

Hello and welcome to my new blog.

One of my passions is open government and I enjoy making public records requests, so I decided to share my adventures with you here on this site.

I was lucky when I started as a reporter at the New Jersey Herald that I had someone show me the ropes (Seth Augenstein) but have had to learn a whole to new skill set with all the federal entities in Monterey.

New Jersey's Open Public Records Act is one of the most progressive public records laws in the country, allowing people to get an answer in seven days. I even wrote this story for its 10th birthday.

California's law is pretty weak in comparison. A public entity has a maximum of 24 days to release records, give a date for their release or explain what exemption allows them not to release it.

That brings me to the big, bad Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. I've thought up some better names for it: Frowned on Instantaneously Act, Forgot or Ignored Act, Free-reign on Information Abolishing, Fallacy of Information Assumption. You get the point.

I actually find filing FOIAs really easy. You just go to FOIA.gov, click on "FOIA Contacts" at the top of the page and scroll down to the department you want. The problem is it can take months to get a response and you need to call and harass them.

There's a recent Kickstarter campaign for something to make FOIA requests easier. It is called the "FOIA Machine" and has raised $53, 503 so far. I think it has some good features - a reminder to call federal entities, a way to share requests and a feature that connects to social media - but something I doubt I would use.

FOIA.gov already does a great job of pointing you in the right direction and I fear FOIA Machine's function to alert me when I might have made a mistake would be a bad thing. Some of my best requests have involved something I unintentionally got.

Having said that, I don't actually have access to the software so I can't say it won't be useful for the public and it is run by the Center for Investigative Reporting, which has been doing some really great stuff lately.

Tomorrow I will begin digging into the treasure trove of requests. My goal with Open to the Public is to share documents I could not necessarily make into a story but may be useful to someone out there.