The Port of Olympia commission voted Monday night to move forward with a final settlement agreement covering three lawsuits, two of which were filed against the port nearly eight years ago.
The lawsuits were filed by Arthur West of Olympia, an open government advocate who sued the port twice in 2007 and once in 2012, according to port data.
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Read More… from Port will settle lawsuits with open government advocate
The Senate has passed a bill to update the Freedom of Information Act.
By voice vote on Monday, lawmakers endorsed a bill by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas that the sponsors said would require federal agencies to have a presumption of openness.
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Read More… from Senate Passes Bill To Improve The Freedom Of Information Act
Illinois Governor Pat Quinn stopped a $20 million state construction grant to the College of DuPage last June when a troubling email surfaced from President Robert Breuder to the Board of Trustees. The email outlined a political strategy helpful to the incumbent governor in an effort to procure the millions of dollars. Furthermore, Breuder suggested “bank it until we figure out how to use it, and then building something.” It was the first in a long line of irregularities uncovered during our seven-month investigation of the $300 million-per-year community college.
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Read More… from College of DuPage FOIA requests question spending
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting via Columbia Journalism Review:
The nonprofit Citizens Awareness Foundation was founded to “empower citizens to exercise their right to know,” according to its mission statement. The South Florida millionaire backing the foundation hired one of the state’s most prominent public records activists to run it, rented office space, and pledged to pay the legal fees to make sure people had access to government records.
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Read More… from Florida’s frequent FOIA flyers, and their law firm connection
Several federal regulatory agencies expressing concerns about intrusions into their internal decision-making processes have thrown a major roadblock in the path of a bill aimed at easing disclosure of records under the Freedom of Information Act.
Acting on the agencies' criticisms, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) placed a hold on the measure last week just as it appeared on course to swift passage in the Senate.
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Santa Rosa residents want to be heard. They want to have a say at City Hall.
That’s clearer than ever to anyone who observed the Mayor’s Open Government Task Force, which spent about seven months listening to local citizens and studying other communities before delivering an action plan to the City Council on Tuesday.
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Read More… from Editorial: Changing the culture at City Hall
Closed sessions are simply a fact of life for governmental bodies. If you haven’t witnessed a board going into closed session, you simply haven’t attended enough meetings.
Lately, the Rowan County Commission’s agenda contained one closed session a week. The most recent ones concerned the former Salisbury Mall, now West End Plaza. Before that, there were a couple of closed sessions pertaining to hiring Aaron Church as the new county manager.
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Read More… from Editorial: Government transparency can always improve
The House unanimously passed a bill that would bring much-needed improvements to the Freedom of Information Act; the Senate had bi-partisan support for it, too — but outgoing Sen Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) singlehandedly killed the bill in a closed-door committee meeting.
He offered vague, bullshitty excuses for this, citing nonspecific issues with privacy that don't bear even cursory scrutiny.
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Read More… from Senator Jay Rockefeller singlehandedly kills Freedom of Information Act reform
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, late in the day, two veteran Tallahassee reporters finally received important public records from the office of Gov. Rick Scott. They had had requested the records, emails, more than three months prior, many weeks before Scott won a narrow re-election victory over former Gov. Charlie Crist.
While candidates might prefer to control the timing of a damaging news report — say, until after an election — Florida law doesn’t provide for that level of control where the release of public records are concerned.
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Read More… from Opinion: Is a three-month delay for public records really ‘open government?’
Downtown Publications is appealing the denial of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made to Bloomfield Township on September 14, 2014, requesting information relative to the pension obligation bond issue investments, including a copy of a Miller Canfield review of the investments done this past spring or summer, and any and all reports generated by firms subcontracted by the law firm, which the township's legal counsel in October denied as exempt under "attorney client privilege."
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