Last week, over 1,500 journalists convened in Phoenix for the 40th Investigative Reporters and Editors conference. And while leaks, scraping, and a number of other cutting-edge techniques were all on display, many attendees brought great FOIA and public records ideas with them. Here’s some of the suggestions I picked up, including stories you can use for inspiration.

• Blood Banks: Vicky Nguyen, Liza Meak and Jeremy Carroll looked into how umbilical cord blood banking is a $4 billion dollar industry - which very rarely benefits child donors while it racks up customer complaints. Extra credit for mixing public records and digging into other data sets, such as Yelp reviews.
• Congressional Correspondence With Agencies: The Wall Street Journal’s James V. Grimaldi noted that while Congress is exempt from FOIA, their correspondence with agencies often is not, so you can request that.
• Daycare violations
• Data mentioned in press releases: A tip from Madi Alexander - always dig into the numbers that politicians and agency heads proudly tout. What’s actually behind those numbers? A number of journalists shared stories about recalculating official statistics and finding the math was slightly off.

Not just for watchdogging, but for getting interesting data: monitor press releases for stats so you can target them for requests! #IRE17

— Melissa Lewis (@iff_or) June 25, 2017

• Find out who is eating on the job: In Albuquerque, Ryan Luby used a public records request to show that a bus driver accused of negligence in a crash was not texting while driving, as previously reported, but eating while driving — eating a burrito, to be precise.

• Find out who is drinking on the job: Vicky Nguyen showcased how she used expense reports to show how chancellor Ron Galatolo of the San Mateo County Community College District used public money to purchase alcohol — which is expressly prohibited by the organization’s policies. (Several attendees talked about the usefulness of requesting procurement card data — commonly known as p-card data).

• Fraud complaints about for-profit colleges: One of Vasquez’s stories on the subject.

#ire17 @MrMikeVasquez found "gold mine" in FOIA'ing state AG files of fraud investigations at for-profit colleges. pic.twitter.com/eSdNwZDYfc

— Frank LoMonte (@FrankLoMonte) June 22, 2017

• FOIA logs: Get ideas for your own future requests by seeing what others have asked for in the past.

• Job creation agreements: When corporations get tax breaks to build new operations, they often promise the world — but do they meet those commitments? Ask for memorandums of understanding and other agreements.

• Nursing home neglect data

• Prison Population Reports or Prison Census Reports: Paige St. John used monthly prison population reports to quantify overcrowding in California prisons.

• Public-private partnership agreements: If agencies are relying on private industry to take on some of their work, what protections are in place for the public? Is it really a good deal? Danielle Ivory suggests asking for the agreements — it’s a major red flag if they don’t exist.

• Records Retention Schedules: A lot of these are already online, but they can be an invaluable resource in knowing what agencies are supposed to hang on to and for how long, as well as exactly how they refer to forms.

• School evacuation plans: How prepared are our schools when disaster strikes? That’s the question Madi Alexander asked after tornadoes hit Oklahoma in 2013, leaving students and teachers scrambling for safety. She supplemented interviews with public records requests for school emergency response plans and found that some schools planned on busing students to nearby schools or churches if things got bad. She ultimately found that 19 out of 33 schools had no shelter, and she supplemented local public records requests with a FOIA to FEMA to get grant proposals these schools had submitted for storm shelter funding. Read her presentation as well as one of her stories.

• Spending on hotel rooms for the homeless: Chris Glorioso, Erica Jorgensen, and Evan Stulberger dug into why New York pays more for hotel rooms than the average tenant — even though the city is a massive customer.

• State Cybersecurity Breaches

• Traffic Stop Data: The Stanford Open Policing Project filed dozens of requests and got back information on millions of traffic stops from around the country, which they have cleaned up and standardized.

• Inspections of everything from school cafeterias to bridges and dams

• Water Loss Reports/Audits: Thanks to aging infrastructure, billions of gallons of water are lost a year. That not only results in waste but drives up costs for taxpayers — and sometimes results in overbilling.

• What is killing homeless people: James Barragán shared a story he did for the American-Statesman and its Spanish-language weekly ¡Ahora Sí! that used data from a Texas public records request to show the top killers of the homeless in Central Texas: Homicides, suicides and accidents were disproportionate, with substance abuse the leading cause of death.

In other public records news, IRE kept up its annual tradition of awarding the Golden Padlock to agencies that creatively or aggressively obstructed the public’s right to know. It was stiff competition this year, with Reclaim the Records tremendous battle with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services for population statistics earning an honorable mention (you can follow along with the fight here).

This year’s winner just got a promotion: Scott Pruitt, formerly of the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office and now of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, won ‘for its “abject failure” to abide by the Oklahoma Open Records Act,’ failing to release emails that ultimately showed close ties with industry that pushed him to role back environmental regulation.

And now that IRE has wrapped up it’s time to put all those ideas into practice. Catch some ideas or inspiration I missed? Let me know via email or on Twitter.

For other ideas from the conference, IRE members can check out the IRE website for tipsheets and presentations, and Melissa Lewis of the Oregonian took great notes.

Image via Alan Stark and licensed under Creative Commons.