In Florida, the Sunshine law permits any resident to obtain consumption information of any household if they are serviced by a municipal utility. I can walk in

In Florida, the Sunshine law permits any resident to obtain consumption information of any household if they are serviced by a municipal utility. I can walk into Gainesville Regional Utility and ask for a copy of all residents' consumption information and they will grudgingly hand me a cd of data from over 90,000 homes. Thinking this might be pretty useful for comparing similar cities from across the nation, I started calling and e-mailing other local municipal utilities. No such luck. Apparently Florida is an anomaly and they know it--currently they're trying their best to eliminate this part from the law because they think it encourages identity theft. Getting good data is indeed quite difficult.