Missouri agency tried to bill a genealogy group $1.5 million for records

This summer, a lawyer for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services responded to a genealogy group’s request for birth and death records. The lawyer said fulfilling the Sunshine Law request would require 35,604 hours of staff time and cost $1.49 million.

A few days later, another lawyer at the department sent Reclaim the Records, the nonprofit genealogy group, a revised estimate. Alas, it was still ridiculous amount of money. After making a 72-cent adjustment in the hourly rate for staff time, a Health and Senior Services attorney said the records would now cost a mere $1.46 million.

Faced with an agency in Unthinking Bureaucrat mode, Reclaim the Records hired an attorney, Bernie Rhodes, a media-law specialist at the Kansas City law firm Lathrop & Gage. Rhodes asked the Department of Health and Senior Services for more information about the database that stored the birth and death records. Based on the information, he suggested some ideas and even provided the toll-free number for the help desk for software provider the department uses to retrieve records from its database.

After considering Rhodes’ suggestions, the department quoted a new estimate. The records, the department said, would now cost $5,174.

The story doesn’t end there, however.

On August 9, a week after determining that Reclaim the Records’ request would not, in fact, require thousands of hours of staff time, the Department of Health and Human Services notified Rhodes that it was refusing to provide the records, citing a section of the Vital Records Act.

Rhodes, in response, fired off a letter that basically said, “This is bullshit.” The letter contains blistering passages with titles such as “You fundamentally misunderstand the Sunshine Law” and “The runaround must end.”

The Department of Health and Senior Services did not respond to Rhodes’ letter. So he filed a lawsuit last month demanding the department produce the requested records for no more than $500 and pay his fees. 

Dan Margolies, editor of the Heartland Health Monitor team, has more on the story at kcur.org.