Nick Stafford was sick of being given the runaround from the Lebanon Department of Motor Vehicles in Virginia. All Nick wanted to know was how to register his son's new car because he had four homes in two different counties under his name.
He called the Lebanon DMV, which routed him to Richmond. The dad submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and called various numbers, only to be rebuffed by employees. He called nine other DMV locations and filed lawsuits, until months later he got the answer to the simple question in court.
That's right, it took a lawsuit for the state's attorney general to hand Nick a list of the phone numbers he needed to solve the problem. The court threw out the case, but Nick was satisfied because he proved his point: it should not be this difficult for a citizen to get their hands on public information.
“I think the backbone to our republic and our democracy is open government and transparency in government, and it shocks me that a lot of people don't know the power of FOIA,” he said.
Stafford felt that the DMV unnecessarily inconvenienced him, taking up far too much of his time. His revenge? He paid his licensing fees with 300,000 pennies, which together weighed about 1,600 pounds.
“If they were going to inconvenience me then I was going to inconvenience them,” he told the Herald Courier.
The DMV employees were forced to count the pennies by hand. But Nick was perfectly within the law to pay with the currency under the Coinage Act of 1965.
It took the DMV until 1 a.m. to count all of the pennies, and Stafford watched the entire time.
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