Brooke Schreier Ganz
/ KCUR
Originally published on April 12, 2021 3:00 pm
Missouri has been ordered to cough up nearly $138,000 in legal fees and expenses after a judge ruled last year that it “knowingly and purposefully” violated the state Sunshine Law.
The Missouri Court of Appeals upheld a Cole County judge’s finding that the state ran afoul of the law when the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services sought to charge a genealogy research group nearly $1.5 million for state birth and death records.
Reclaim the Records, a California-based nonprofit whose mission is to make public records available online for genealogical and historical researchers, made the request in early 2016, seeking Missouri birth and death indexes since 1910. After more than four months, the Department of Health and Senior Services responded, saying it would cost more than $1.49 million to retrieve the records from its database.