Mayor Alvin Brown says he's beefing up the city's website to put more information about city government at the fingertips of citizens.
Earlier this week, the City of Jacksonville was recognized by the First Amendment Foundation for having the most transparent city website in Florida. Meanwhile, on Thursday, Brown announced the launch of www.coj.net/transparency.
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Read More… from City of Jax website, most transparent in Florida
It was a chilling crime and, even with a quick arrest, disturbing questions lingered.
Derrick Thompson called 911 in the coastal Maine city of Biddeford to report that he was being threatened. Police checked out the complaint, decided it was a civil matter and left the scene. Three minutes later, the teenager and his girlfriend were shot dead.
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Read More… from Not just a federal issue: Transparency declining in local government, some say
As stated in the preamble to the Brown Act, our state’s open government law: “The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.”
In the last few weeks, the city of San Diego has experienced two major failures in providing the public with open and transparent government.
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Read More… from San Diegans have a right to transparency in government
Councils are not doing anything with valuable data that offers insight into the needs of communities, according to the local government thinktank Localis. In their report, based on interviews with council leaders in the UK, they said that local authorities could use data to find out what residents want in a similar way private companies such as Amazon do.
Council leaders said that, particularly around the integration of health and social care, partners were unwilling to share data and that a lack of knowledge about data protection laws was holding things back.
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Read More… from Sixteen ways (UK) councils can better use data
While Delawareans familiar with the state’s Freedom of Information Act rules may understand guidelines surrounding fees, some may still be surprised once they receive the bill following their request.
A batch of public records requests made to Delaware shore towns showed widely diverging approaches to how much, if at all, a community charges for access to documents.
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Locally elected officials are expected to conduct public business in the open, and not behind closed doors. And any abuse of closed-door executive sessions represents a serious breach of trust between an elected official and those constituents he or she is charged with serving.
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Read More… from Open government: Closed doors problematic in Tazewell (WV)
Cities and their photo enforcement contractors are often reluctant to respond to freedom of information act requests. Odessa, Texas did its best to suppress a request for emails between city employees and American Traffic Solutions (ATS) by allowing the vendor to argue it was exempt from handing over the documents.
"Information is excepted from the requirements of [the public disclosure law] if it is information that, if released, would give advantage to a competitor or bidder," states Section 552.104 of the Texas Government Code, which ATS cited.
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Read More… from Texas Attorney General Orders Camera Company To Produce Documents
Attorneys for the city of Nitro will argue Monday before the West Virginia Supreme Court that a circuit judge erred by not allowing the city to charge $25 an hour to look up information to fulfill Freedom of Information Act requests.
In 2009, the Nitro City Council approved an ordinance charging citizens $25 an hour if it took city officials more than 10 minutes to look up information to comply with FOIA requests. The fee was supposed to compensate the city for the time it took to collect the requested information.
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The charge that South Burlington failed to publicly announce a gathering of a quorum of city councilors underscores the need for public officials to be far more aware of appearances.
The open meeting controversy brewing in the City Council also offers a cautionary tale for local politicians who must operate in a hyper-partisan environment.
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Read More… from Voice of the Free Press: When it comes to open government, appearance matter
In recent years, the central government in the UK has been involved in pushing an open data agenda, not only on its home turf, but also globally through the Open Government Partnership of which it was one of the eight founding members. The idea is to create governments that are more open, accessible and accountable by giving the public access to a vast array of datasets that are downloadable and reusable.
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Read More… from In UK, Open Data is putting fear into local government
