Real Estate & Property Law

FOIA Requests

By Alan Ackerman

Daily Astorian

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has dropped its appeal of a federal court decision and agreed to produce a list of private landowners who are affected by the Palomar gas pipeline.

FERC appealed a decision by Oregon's U.S. District Court in a Freedom of Information Act dispute filed by Columbia and Willamette Riverkeeper.

Riverkeeper requested FERC's mailing list for landowners affected by the pipeline development. FERC uses the list to send the landowners information regarding their rights and the potential use of eminent domain.

After FERC dropped its appeal, the agency produced all of the information the groups requested, including the mailing lists.   

Maybe FERC has dropped its appeal and produced a landowners witness list of those affected by the potential condemnation, but it does have some concerns.
    

The whole notion of FOIA is to fully apprise the people of public agency activity. Balanced against this is the concern of governmental agencies that lawyers will unfairly solicit cases and misrepresent what is occurring in the governmental action.  Any governmental agency would admit that sometimes they run amuck in their offers and in the way they treat people.  At the same time, there is a tough balance here between the right to privacy of those being taken and the right to knowledge and free exchange of information between those being taken.  This simply is not an easy question to answer.
    

Without regard to all the statements above, having a fair and open Freedom of Information Act is a lot better than having nothing!

Full post as published by National Eminent Domain Blog on December 11, 2009 (boomark / email).