An audit that sharply criticized the Department of Natural Resources’ support of a private game wardens conference in 2007 had its origins in my colleague David Shaffer’s reporting back in May. The Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor found the DNR improperly spent nearly $300,000 and violated state law against private fund-raising by state employees.

That audit was one of three released Thursday by the Legislative Auditor, all of them targeting the financial practices of state agencies.

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I came back from vacation this week and in my mailbox, to my delight, was a thick envelope from the Federal Aviation Administration. On July 18, I had filed a Freedom of Information Act request through the FAA web site for records of objects that fall from the sky from aircraft. I was curious about how often such things happened, and what it meant for those on the ground.

The Aug. 6 letter from Joseph K. Tintera, manager in the FAA’s Regulatory Support Division in Oklahoma City, indicated that the nation’s aviation safety office apparently doesn’t have a unique description for such events.

Nevertheless, to the agency’s credit, it ran several keyword searches in its database, including “dropped off,” “separated from,” “fell off” and the most-used term of art related to plummeting pieces: “departed the aircraft.”

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Should you have a problem with your local hospital, nursing home, hospice, home health agency, boarding care home or supervised living facility, a state agency called the Office of Health Facility Complaints stands ready to take your call. And it helpfully posts records of complaints and investigations online.

To get a flavor of the kind of information available, I searched for all facilities with resolved complaints since July 1. The search returned information about 53 complaints about 49 providers. Of those, 10 complaints were listed as “substantiated,” 16 were listed as “inconclusive” and the remainder were “unsubstantiated.”

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My heart starts racing when the latest issue of FYi arrives in my inbox. FYi is the quarterly newsletter of the Minnesota Department of Administration’s Information Policy Analysis Division. Despite its almost comically bureaucratic name, this agency’s work has a very real influence on how much we can find out about the activities of government in Minnesota. This is the agency that fields complaints about government hiding public records or elected officials meeting in secret.

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