Howard Forman, who now has to pay people to hide information from you.

For members of the public (including the news media), getting court files from the Broward County Clerk of Courts has been a somewhat arduous process in recent years. The clerk's offices are crowded and short-staffed, and members of the public need to awkwardly sign in on a clipboard while an overworked employee reads the clipboard upside-down to see what case files are needed, then shuttles back and forth to get old records delivered from an off-site warehouse in three to five days.

In recent years, the process got worse, as the state government cut clerks' budgets and staff was further reduced. Still, there was a bright side: If a court file was present in the building, you could look at it right away.

That has all changed now, as new Florida laws require the clerk to redact personal information from any file before it's handed over. Now, it takes a week to see files that are already there. And behind the scenes, the clerk's office is struggling to keep up with requests and with the new law. More >>

Allen West: Rolling in the deep (pockets).

​Say what you will about Allen West as a legislator; as a fundraiser, there's no doubting that he's very, very good. Finance documents submitted to the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday complete a picture of 2011 fundraising that reveals he's raised about $5.8 million so far in the election cycle. That's more than any member of the U.S. House of Representatives other than Speaker John Boehner, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.More >>

"Gimme dat money!"

​I admit there's almost no Broward/Palm Beach connection to the super PAC run by Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert, but I'm going to be waist-deep in South Florida's disclosure forms for a while, so hopefully this will tide you over.More >>

​Bill Di Scipio, a Southwest Ranches resident who is spearheading the campaign against a proposed ICE detention facility, has bombarded the town with public-records requests for months now. Some of his requests have been successful, yielding emails that provide a glimpse into the otherwise secretive negotiations that have gone on as prison contractor CCA and the town have sweet-talked the final stages of a deal with ICE.More >>

unofficiallywinslow.blogspot.com

​In what would seem like an effort to ban the often insulting and/or profanity-laden public records requests of activist Chaz Stevens, the Deerfield Beach Housing Authority voted at its last Board of Commissioners meeting to adopt a resolution outlawing "improper" requests for public records.

In the opinion of Stevens, as well as the opinion we received from an independent open-government foundation, the housing authority isn't quite authorized to impose such a barrier.

Here's what came from the minutes of the Housing Authority's August meeting:

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Yeah, you can find those emails next to the Columbia/HCA memos. LOL!

Gov. Rick Scott loves to tout how open his office is to records requests -- never mind the outrageous price tag -- but it gets a little tough to acquire public records when they magically disappear.

That's what happened to the St. Petersburg Times' Capitol reporter Michael C. Bender, he wrote last night, when he went looking for some emails from the governor and his transition team while he was Florida's governor-elect.

Bender says his paper requested the documents in January, and yesterday -- which was August 18 -- Scott's office decided to let him know that they're pretty sure all those emails they requested were deleted in January.

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Information? We'll bill you for it.

​Since Gov. Rick Scott's office decided that the public and reporters had to pay a price for open government in early March, it's been a huge complaint.

They're not backtracking on charging people, but they're having a sale on getting information, according to a memo released today by the governor's office.

The memo, from the governor's communication director, Brian Burgess, says that the state will now impose "a special service charge" if someone submits a records request that takes a bit of brain capacity for a worker to fill.
 
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cinema-suicide.com

Faces of Death: A crappy movie that makes videos of people dying very scary.

​Thanks to the Florida lawmakers' successful bid to legislate morality in the state's public records law, we may never know how 18-year-old Eric Perez died in the hands of state workers.

Perez died about a week ago at a West Palm Beach juvenile detention facility, due to either breathing problems, an enlarged heart, maybe a stroke, or after becoming "ill and psychotic" -- at least those are the different stories officials have told Perez's mother, according to the Miami Herald.

His death was recorded on video, but since HB 411 was signed into effect by the governor, the media -- and subsequently, the public -- may never get to see that video.

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Kickstart Your Heart

​A retired Davie police officer is suing his former employer and the town for more than 100 grand, claiming they schtupped him out of disability benefits after he had a heart attack on the job, according to a recently filed lawsuit.

Michael Necolletos, an 11-year veteran of the Davie P.D., filed for Workers Compensation after a 2007 heart attack left him unable to patrol.
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