The FOIA requests and the quoted fees
Paulides filed Freedom of Information Act requests for park missing-person records; by his account he was first told no lists existed, then quoted about $34,000 for Yosemite and $1.4 million for the whole system.
2013 CE · 37.75, -119.59 · status: account
The account
Paulides says his requests to the Park Service were at first answered with a statement that it kept no such lists. He later recounted that an agency lawyer quoted roughly $34,000 to compile Yosemite's cases and $1.4 million for every park, the cost of searching paper files across hundreds of units. The figures are known from his own books and talks rather than a published agency document, and the data scientist Kyle Polich confirmed only that requests were made and some were denied. Supporters read the fees as stonewalling; critics read them as the real cost of building a list that did not exist. The Park Service has since released some files, for example on the 1981 Stacy Arras case, through its FOIA reading room.
The sceptical view
High FOIA fees are the normal result of asking an agency to create a dataset by hand from scattered records.
Connections in the atlas
- Stacy Arras, Yosemite
- The TRACE Act: counting the missing on federal land
- No central list of the missing in US national parks
- David Paulides, author of 'Missing 411'
- 'Missing 411' and Yosemite