The Internal Revenue Service announced today that 2,087 Washington state taxpayers are due a total of $2.2 million in refunds for their 2010 federal taxes, which could not be delivered because of wrong mailing addresses. If you think you may be in that group, you can use the IRS tool, Where’s My Refund? to check, and update your contact information so you can receive a refund owed. A telephone version of the service is at 1-800-829-1954. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: Public Data Ferret’s “mother blog” site Social Capital Review periodically profiles noteworthy nonprofits or community initiatives with ties to our base coverage area of Western Washington.

By Scott Patton

You already know that Washington’s extensive trail network serves tens of thousands of annual users. But you may not know that it’s also a training ground for 15,000 volunteers a year from all over the globe, who learn outdoor stewardship from the local non-profit EarthCorps, headquartered off Sand Point Way in Northeast Seattle next to Magnuson Park.

On a recent summer weekend, EarthCorps member and crew leader A.J. Velon was helping move rocks that weigh hundreds of pounds to build a turnpike on the Snoqualmie Lake Trail. The Snoqualmie Lake camp used by the crew is an eight mile hike from a fairly remote trail head. The crew of six included participants from Kazakhstan, Peru, and Fiji. The work starts everyday at 7:30 am and goes until 5:00 pm and consists of tasks ranging from repairing campsites, to repairing trails and building drainage structures. This goes on for 11 days. Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. Department of Defense announced recently that Puyallup, Wash. company Absher Construction has won a $35,275,888 contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Honolulu, to build an enlisted personnel housing facility at the U.S. Army’s Schofield Barracks in Oahu, Hawaii. The barracks are a 102-year-old installation and home to the Army’s 25th Infantry Division. The company will construct two five-story buildings, each with 100 dwelling units. Absher will work in conjunction with Tetra Tech, of Seattle, the project architect. Absher’s Web site says the total project cost is $74 million. This is not the first U.S. defense contract for Absher. The company has won several separate contracts of more than $40 million apiece to build barracks at Fort Lewis in Pierce County, Wash. and is currently working on a $71 million Bachelors Enlisted Quarters and Parking Facility at Naval Station Kitsap in Bremerton, Wash.

The Department of Defense’s military contract announcements database reveals more. Read the rest of this entry »

This guest article is authored by Kelly Sprute, Public Affairs Specialist, USDA – Forest Service, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Everett, Wash. office

Eating skunk cabbage leaf salmon or stinging nettle soup doesn’t sound like an entrée at a local restaurant, but Pacific Northwest Native Americans have eaten these foods for centuries.

“I liked the stinging nettle soup but the aftertaste numbed my tongue,” said Samantha James, Ferndale High student and Lummi member. “It felt like my tongue was asleep. I tried to talk but no one understood me,” she said. Samantha learned about nettles and other traditional native foods at the Northwest Indian College in Bellingham, Wash. She enjoyed the salmon wrapped in skunk cabbage, it was juicy and tender, but the leaf stunk.

Samantha James comes across stinging nettles plant while using loppers to clear brush away from Boyd Creek Interpretive Trail/U.S. Forest Service

Samantha’s interest in native foods and heritage led her to participate in the college’s Saturday Science Academy. High school students meet with college students every second Saturday of the month to learn about a science, from physics to astronomy. This month the academy took a trip to Boyd Creek Interpretive Trail on the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest to help open the ADA accessible trail.

Here Samantha and the students did trail maintenance: hacking away encroaching shrubs, brushing off winter debris from the boardwalk and cleaning moss-covered signs; but what they took away was more than sore muscles and blisters. They learned about a healthy forest ecosystem and made another connection to their tribal heritage and the land. Read the rest of this entry »

The online news and knowledge base site Public Data Ferret is offering three 2011 summer internship suitable for college undergraduate or graduate students who reside in Washington state and are majoring in any of the following subjects: digital media, journalism, political science, public affairs, or communications. If online government transparency is important to you, and you’d like to further develop your online portfolio of news work, using the written word, video or graphics, we’d welcome your letter (e-mail) of interest and work samples.

The internships are: news-writing; video storytelling; and data visualization. Read the rest of this entry »

“Matt Rosenberg, a creator of Public Eye Northwest, a nonprofit formed last year to boost digital literacy, build community news and promote best practices in government transparency, spoke about his organization and its website, Public Data Ferret….Citizens need to dig up more in the public realm because newspapers aren’t able to cover as much as they once did, he said, referring to the economic challenges confronting the news media. ‘The community has to step up and take more of a role,’ Rosenberg said.”

By Ramsey Ramerman

“We give government our tax dollars with few strings attached. But one “string” – the most important string – is that we insist on having the right to know how our money is spent. This string is attached by transparency laws. The people’s “right to know” is how We the People can maintain at least some control over how government spends our money.

One such string was contained in the Wall Street reform bill passed by Congress last year. An audit provision required the Federal Reserve to disclose that it loaned $9 trillion to private banks and corporations during the 2008-09 bailout – more than four times the United States’ annual tax revenue – including more than $1 trillion to foreign banks.

These are the taxpayers’ dollars, so taxpayers have a right to know how the Federal Reserve makes its decisions – all of its decisions, not just those made during the bailout.”

Read the full guest op-ed in The Everett Herald.

By David Herzog

These next few months will be busy here in Open Missouri-land. Mizzou J-School master’s students who are working on the project will be stepping up their efforts to collect inventories of databases held offline by state government agencies. How’s that going, you ask? It depends on the agency. Some, such as the Missouri Ethics Commission, have happily told us about the public data they collect. So give them a gold star for openness; the commission clearly gets its obligation to the public. Gold stars go to the departments of Conservation and Natural Resources; both of them provided detailed information in the spring, during a pre-Open Missouri pilot run. Other agencies say they’re working on compiling the information. We’re learning that many agencies lack internal inventories of their databases and need to create them for us….Finally, some agencies have flat-out told us they’re not going to divulge information about the data they collect using taxpayer money. I’ll provide a detailed scorecard later.

All of the information we collect will go into the Open Missouri website, which we hope to start developing within the next month. We’re going to work closely with our friends at the Sunlight Foundation and use code from their National Data Catalog.

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(Read the full post at the Reynolds Journalism Institute blog, here.)